


The Meaning of Questions

by avocadomoon



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Academia, Intergenerational Trauma, M/M, Pining, Poetry, Professional Power Dynamics, The modern day love letter is an email message sent in the middle of the night
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-22
Updated: 2021-01-22
Packaged: 2021-03-13 22:21:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28910763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/avocadomoon/pseuds/avocadomoon
Summary: Dr. Kaspbrak shook his head in visible amazement. "The only son of Dr. Wentworth Tozier, who casually spent ten years goofing off on television, only to roll up atYale Universitywith a fully-funded six years to study whatever he wants? Okay. Sure. You didn't know." He shook his head, this time in a very familiar sort of disdain. "Like I said. Everyone's either in love, or terrified. There doesn't seem to be much of anything in-between that I've noticed so far."Richie bit back the urge to ask:and which are you?
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Richie Tozier & Wentworth Tozier
Comments: 46
Kudos: 205





	The Meaning of Questions

**Author's Note:**

> come say hi on twitter! @avocadomooon

Richie was charming but somehow not great at networking, which was to say he was great at networking when he didn't think about the fact that he was networking. He _was_ great at making friends. Usually alcohol did the heavy lifting, but he'd managed to survive eight years in New York City as a full time working stand up comedian, so he had a battle-honed sense of timing. He could swoop in and pounce at exactly the right moment and endear himself to the Chair of Whatever or the Dean of Where's That Again and most of the time he wouldn't even realize that he'd successfully made a professional contact until the next morning when he'd Google the person's name who had appeared in his cell phone contacts. 

Not that most of the English Department parties were good for anything else. Richie had moved overnight from cheap well vodka and the frenetic vulgarity of the New York comedy bar scene to gin cocktails and (just as frenetic, although most had at least acquired at least some social subtlety) competitive pretentiousness of the college bars in New Haven, Connecticut. Needless to say, he was experiencing some jet lag. His thinking was, since he had no hope of impressing anyone with his CV or his academic credentials, he might as well fall back on what he did best and make them laugh. To his surprise, it seemed to be working. 

"Oh, stand up comedy, huh," someone would say, having already heard the wild gossip about That Lit PhD Who Was On SNL, "what on earth made you want to go back to grad school? Seems like a hell of a career change!" and Richie would dutifully entertain them with a sordid story about the horrific experience that was auditioning at 30 Rock, or the endurance test of doing your income taxes when your income was paid intermittently in cash (and sometimes Visa gift cards) by comedy club floor managers. This was charming enough to the trust fund PhDs that populated the literature department that Richie would immediately become fun and interesting instead of loud and weird, and thus Richie was slowly becoming somewhat well-known around campus. That he was accomplishing this by turning himself into the dancing monkey mascot of Yale University was not lost on him, but - well, beggars couldn't be choosers. He'd learned this as a kid - make them laugh with you, not at you. Oldest trick in the book, really, and it worked just as well in the Ivy Leagues as it did in Mrs. Falcolm's sixth grade geography class. 

Richie was thirty-two and bored of himself already. He had full funding and his parents were proud of him for the first time in his life, but he hadn't gotten laid in almost a year, and the drooling fetuses he taught in his seminars had terrible, very loud opinions on _Gatsby_. He wasn't the oldest in the program but he wasn't the average age either - that honor went to the fresh-faced nerds that had moved seamlessly from undergrad into the MA/PhD track without even moving out of student housing - but he was still always aware of his age, always aware that he'd be a professor himself already, had he taken the offer at NYU a decade ago and done the same thing. Worse still was that he'd accidentally become a mentor to some of those kids, which was embarrassing, and what the fuck did he know? His life advice consisted mostly of how to disappoint your parents, and how to land a good poop joke for a post-midnight, mostly-drunk crowd of Midwestern tourists. He still didn't really know what the fuck he was doing there, most days. Half the time he wondered if his father hadn't written a letter or something, begging the admissions board to give Richie a respectable offer so Dr. Tozier would have something to brag about at the Bowdoin College staff dinner parties. 

This was the mood he was trapped in, the night he met the visiting lecturer from Illinois, a weedy, sunken-eyed poetry professor who was rumored to be on a shortlist for Bendingham's spot once he finally gave up the ghost and retired. Dr. Keller, Kespam, Krispy - Doctor something. Richie did a shot of bourbon and vermouth at the bar as subtly as he could and introduced himself as the guy walked past him towards the bathroom. Needless to say, he wasn't planning on making a good impression. 

"Are you - " the guy said, leaning his weight back on one leg to squint up at Richie in the dim light. The bar was lit by candles - some real pretentious shit, not that Richie wasn't used to it by then - and the event ("mixer") was one of the dullest that the English Department had hosted, which was really saying something. Two months ago Richie had slept through a dramatic reading of _The Shepheardes Calender_ by an MFA with a monotone that rivaled Ben Stein's. "Richie, you said? Sorry, I didn't hear your last name."

"Tozier," Richie said, leaning against the bar to make himself shorter. This was a trick that worked equally well on short, arrogant comedians as it did on short, arrogant academics. "PhD candidate. I'm working with Dr. Guerrero."

"Right, you're the one who likes Georgette Heyer."

Richie bit the inside of his cheek. His MA thesis was something of a joke among his professors. It was either that or "SNL guy," most of the time. "Yeah, that's me. I'm a real romantic."

The guy smirked. "You think Heyer was romantic?"

"You don't?"

The guy - a _poetry_ professor - shrugged, a Gallic sort of gesture that instantly put Richie's teeth on edge. "In a formulaic way, maybe. Not that that's a bad thing. Is that the main focus of your dissertation?"

"Formulaic romance?" Richie slouched even more deeply against the bar, turning his head to scan desperately for the bartender, who was deeply occupied with a pretty Classics undergraduate on the other side of the bar. "Maybe. Haven't decided yet."

"Right, still in your first year, right? Plenty of time." Doc Krispy seemed as unimpressed as Richie was, flicking his eyes up and down like a catty cheerleader on a TV show. Richie, in response to both this and the condescending implication of ' _still in your first year_ ,' thrust his hips out somewhat obscenely, and smirked. "Well, nice to meet you. If you're interested at all in poetry, I'm teaching a class on the literature of courtly love in the spring. Might be of interest to you."

Richie's academic focus was Dadaist themes in post-World War II postmodernist fiction. "Wow," he drawled, "sounds great."

Something in his tone must have made the guy bristle, because he straightened his shoulders abruptly, his chin lifting and his mouth flattening. He was the type of guy that Richie would've tried to take home, once upon a time, a bit buttoned up with big Bambi eyes. In a nice suit, he could easily pass for one of the closeted Wall Street schills that Richie used to obsess over in his twenties. As it was, he was wearing the cheap khakis/expensive sweater combo that most academics favored, his eyes were a bit glazed, and Richie didn't feel attracted to him so much as he wanted to piss him off a little bit. Make him flinch. "Not a poet?"

"Myself? No," Richie said, thinking again of the mangling of poor Sir Spenser the other night, "besides, I already fulfilled the poetry requirement. Sorry."

"Did you take an undergrad class?" His face twisted in light disdain, and something in Richie's gut twinged. Maybe lower than his gut. Don't quote him on it. "Intro to American Poetry 101?"

"I actually took the senior level capstone on _The Iliad_ ," Richie lied. "Wrote my final essay on Achilles and Patrocles. Dr. Nathan called it 'insightful.'"

"Achilles and Patrocles. Cute."

"I thought so."

"Interested in Classics, then? I think you're in the wrong program, if that's the case. I understand they're handing out scholarships like Halloween candy to anyone masochistic enough to want to learn Greek."

"Not a languages guy either," Richie said blithely. 

"No? Then what _can_ you do?" While Richie grappled for a reasonably bitchy reply to _that,_ the Krispy Poet turned on one heel, smirking to himself as he wandered away. "Nice to meet you, Tozier. I'll see you around."

"Oh, fuck you," Richie grumbled, not even that quietly, as he wandered off. If he'd heard, he didn't react, slipping into the darkened hallway to the bathrooms, cutting through the small crowd of loud, laughing girls waiting in line for the women's easily and gracefully. Richie glared at the floor in front of him for a minute, and then turned around, determined to draw the bartender away long enough to get another drink. Not his most successful introduction. He was already getting sick of kissing ass, and he hadn't even started writing his dissertation yet. Not a good sign for his future in academia, to say the least. 

This would turn out to be an omen; things did not thaw, between Richie and the poetry professor, even after repeated attempts on Richie's part to be slightly less of a jackass. His name was actually Edward Kaspbrak - Polish, Richie was informed by multiple parties - and their second bad impression was at a boring luncheon where Richie mispronounced it as "Kaspbeak."

"Kasp _brak,_ said Kaspbrak. 

"Sorry," Richie said. 

Kaspbrak squinted like he didn't believe Richie, which was fair, because Richie rarely meant it when he apologized. "What's your last name again?"

Kaspbrak had called him "Tozier" several times already. Richie rolled his eyes and didn't answer, which needless to say didn't improve the situation at all. 

It became clear very quickly that he and Richie were the sorts of people made to annoy each other - Richie was glib, Kaspbrak was cutting, it didn't gel - and they were forced to socialize often enough that their oil/water personalities only seemed to intensify when confronted with each other. Richie was a _little_ embarrassed - he was in his thirties, and leaning hard into sardonic aloofness felt beneath him - but not embarrassed enough to stop. Kaspbrak was bitchy, sharply outlined, like the edge of a knife; he was clearly predisposed to pretension and he always seemed slightly impatient (although he did a passably good job at teaching, judging by his reviews on Rate My Professor) and he was scorchingly hot, a combination which seemed tailor made to drive Richie bananas. He had mysterious tattoos on his arms that he covered up with $300 sweaters and he looked at Richie out of the corner of his eye, like he couldn't even lower himself enough for eye contact. Richie had dated enough straight men to find this extremely sexually arousing, at the same time that he resented the fuck out of him for it. It was sad, really. He wasn't happy about it.

His roommate, one of the classier MFAs (older than your average grad student too), told him he was being an idiot. "You realize Guerrero loves him, right?"

"Guerrero loves anybody who will flirt back when she hits on them, Bill," Richie said. Which also happened to be the main reason Guerrero liked Richie so much. "Have you met him?"

Bill gave a lazy shrug. He had a reputation on campus for being a hack, owed entirely to his vehement defenses of Anne Rice after one too many gin and tonics, but Richie liked him. He was a generous, thoughtful person, which sometimes made him a mediocre writer, but that was what MFAs were _for:_ to stamp the kindness out of you. Richie had a feeling Bill would come out on the other side a slightly more cynical, yet stubbornly kinder person regardless. "I like his work."

"He _writes?_ "

"Of course he writes, Rich, he's a _poetry_ professor. They're giving him some of the undergrad creative writing classes."

Richie rolled his eyes. "There are hundreds - if not thousands - of academics who have managed to study poetry critically without inflicting their own creative vomit on the world en masse."

"Well, he has an MFA," Bill said guilelessly. "From Michigan. He did his doctorate at Berkeley."

Richie whistled. "Fancy ass CV."

"Richie, you are _literally_ an Ivy League PhD. You are right now, as we speak, wearing a sweatshirt that says 'Yale University' on it."

Richie chose to ignore this. "Has he published anything?"

"Magazines, obviously. I think he had a poem in the New Yorker once. He had a fellowship for something a few years back, but something happened and he didn't end up publishing anything," Bill said thoughtfully. "You should look him up. You're gonna be rubbing elbows with him for at least a year, you know - probably longer. Maybe reading his work will make him seem less arrogant."

"If he acted less arrogant it would be easier not to think he's arrogant," Richie said. 

"We're in _academia_ , Richie. By _choice._ We're all arrogant."

Well, Richie had to give him that. 

Kaspbrak had been right about one thing - Richie wasn't a poetry guy. The class he'd taken to fulfill the requirement had been graduate-level, but only barely. He and four MFA students had spent six weeks listening to an aging, obsolete professor in the Jewish Studies department ramble about Emma Lazarus. It was pass/fail, graded mostly on participation, and the final had been a joke. Richie napped through the bulk of it. 

His poetry was easy enough to find online - the New Yorker poem was clever, a little derivative in Richie's opinion, but that's the New Yorker for you - but there was a longer piece Richie found in the Iowa Review that he liked, a _Canterbury Tales_ pastiche about an undescribed narrator trying to make it home on the subway after getting blackout drunk at a bar. The imagery was clever - fairly visceral - and the juxtaposition of modern-day life (trains, bar culture, existential sadness) with the excellent imitation of Chaucer's English made it sort of funny - definitely unique - in a pretentious way. (At least, that's what Bill said, when he read it. Richie, for his part, had lived through enough depressing subway journeys in his life that he ended up liking it for different reasons.)

The fellowship was more interesting - and some subtle/not-subtle interrogation of Ben Hanscom, junior professor in poetics and rhetoric at the University of Nebraska, gave Richie the impression of some kind of scandal. Ben and Richie had met initially through a girl they'd both hooked up with at NYU - Richie being on the downswing of one of his "well, _maybe_ I could be straight" phases at the time - and kept in touch after a very eventful and intimate heart-to-heart one night at a hotel bar at an academic conference in Philadelphia. Richie took advantage of his friendship mostly for gossip purposes, and he was enough of an asshole not to care that Ben was too naive to catch onto his ulterior motives there.

"Kaspbrak? Oh yeah, of course I know him," Ben said. "He's at UIUC."

"Not for long."

"Oh, he got the visiting professor spot then? Good for him," Ben said genuinely. Ben was a good person. "You takin' his temperature, Rich?"

"I'm trying to find more of his creative work actually. He's barely published anything," Richie said, ready with the excuse, "Bill wants to read more of it. I think he's getting some weird ideas about trying his hand at poetry. I caught him listening to Morrisey and writing in a journal last night."

Ben just laughed. "Well, I don't _know_ him know him," he said. "I see him at all the things. You know."

"Right - the _things,_ " Richie said thinly. 

"You know _the things_ too, Tozier. You've been going to _the things_ since you were twelve," Ben replied. 

"Don't remind me," Richie grumbled. He scowled, annoyed with himself, and decided just to be blunt. "You know what the deal is with the Princeton fellowship?"

"Uh, he had one?" Ben said blankly. "I dunno. He didn't publish anything from it. I heard he had to give back some of the money because of it, but that sounded like just a rumor to me."

Richie wasn't even aware that creative fellowships could do that - rescind money. "Was he teaching, when he did it?"

"I don't think so. He only finished his PhD, what, five years ago? UIUC was his first teaching gig. He publishes like crazy though - just not creatively. His background is in Early Modern Poetry but he's been publishing work on anything and everything. He has a knack for hitting on subjects that get everybody talking - that's probably how he caught Yale's attention, if I had to guess. He wrote an essay for Arizona Quarterly on _The Wreck of the Deutschland_ that compared it to a few different modern sci-fi novels and short stories about spaceships - it was brilliant. Definitely caused some waves."

High culture, meet low culture, Richie thought. Fuck, he kind of liked that. _Fuck_. 

"I do know he was offered a residency somewhere, last summer," Ben said. "I heard about it from Mike Hanlon at UNC. He turned it down and told Mike he had a family thing."

He wasn't married, Richie knew that. He might not have liked the guy on sight, but he still checked for a wedding ring. "Isn't that weird? A critical writer who also publishes creative work?"

"No?" Ben said. "Maybe a little weird, about the fellowship, and the residency. But maybe something happened, maybe the guy got writer's block, Rich - who cares? He's got a good reputation, as far as I know. He wouldn't have scored any attention at all from an Ivy League if he didn't."

Well, that was fair. Richie backed off before Ben could start to get any impressions of his own, and resolved to give Professor High/Low Culture another chance. Kaspbrak promptly ruined this noble gesture of goodwill by spilling his latte on Richie's sweater in the staff lounge at LC Hall and then refusing to apologize because Richie "stood up too fast" and "got in his way."

In retaliation, Richie went to one of Kaspbrak's undergraduate poetry readings and made a nuisance of himself, sitting in the back of the room (all six-foot-two of him being fairly conspicuous among the crowd of nervous nineteen-year-olds) and clapping ostentatiously at each poem until Kaspbrak, red-faced and fuming, invited him in a furious undertone to get the fuck out and go fuck himself.

"What, at the same time?" Richie asked, but he did feel a little bad about making the kids nervous, so he left. Some of them were even good! Richie made himself feel better by retweeting a couple of the kids's poetry blogs on Twitter - he still had a respectable amount of followers from his SNL days. (They all came for the poop jokes, and stayed for the 2AM Tristan Tzara-induced threads on philosophy. Or so he liked to think - most of them in reality stayed for the thirst selfies.)

"He fucking hates you. It's actually really funny," said Bev Marsh, a fifth year PhD languishing in Brit Lit 101 purgatory while she struggled to finish her dissertation on Edith Wharton. "The other day someone brought up your name and Googled your Gay Ken Doll skit during the lunch break and he nearly had a hernia. I swear to God, his face turned purple."

"Ah, my magnum opus," Richie said, pushing his glasses up on his forehead so he could lick the inside of his smoothie cup. Bev laughed at him, and cheerfully called him an idiot. "I can't believe you're even taking his class."

"It's interesting," Bev said. She was like Ben in that she thought the best of everybody, but very unlike Ben in that she had almost no tolerance for bullshit, so her opinions were liable to change much faster. Upon meeting her about five years ago, at a party thrown by his dad (of all people), Richie knew almost instantly in his bones that he was definitely, one hundred percent, definitely and certainly gay, because if he'd had even a drop of genuine heterosexuality inside his heart he would've proposed marriage after a week. "He's great at classroom management. With a bunch of creative writing students, you have to admit that's impressive."

Richie, like most PhDs, had been subjected to teaching two semesters of Comp 200 his first year. He shuddered. "Yeah, but - Postcolonial Poetry? Gag me."

"It's fun. And watch your tone, kiddo, you're speaking to an Americanist."

"You're a little cooler than, fucking - who are you even reading? Fucking Longfellow? _Anne Brandstreet?_ "

"Didn't Longfellow teach at Bowdoin?" Bev asked innocently. "No wonder you don't like him."

"Fuck you," Richie said, and she laughed. 

"We've been reading a lot of different things," Bev said, "and Bradstreet is Colonial, not post."

"Well, whatever," Richie said dismissively, "you know how I feel about writers that died before electricity was invented."

"I do," Bev allowed, laughing again. She laughed a lot, which was inspiring to Richie, who sometimes felt like he'd lost the ability to laugh the minute he'd discovered how good he was at making everyone around him do it. What was that saying - the saddest motherfucker in the comedy club was the schmuck on the stage? Something like that. It's not as if Richie's sharp left turn into academia had made him anymore _light_ hearted. "He's engaging. He does a lot of stuff with pop culture, you know, he works in movies and tv shows and shit like that. Last week he made us bring in a modern song that we could compare to one of the poems we've done deep readings on so far. I did a Sidney Lanier poem and a song by The King Blues."

"Clever," Richie commented, aiming his empty cup at the trashcan a few feet away. Bev clapped when it sailed in, not even brushing the rim. Fifteen points, at least. 

"You should take his court poetry class," Bev suggested, as they lingered over cigarettes in the parking lot, "it would really piss him off."

Bev tended to think that kind of thing was very funny. But the course was a full-time, full-length class intended for serious graduate level students and Richie was less than enthused about the idea of listening to Kaspbrak talk, in that sharp, bouncy staccato of his, three times a week for three and a half fucking _months._ "What, just for fun? It doesn't do anything for me, Bev. I only have room for a few more lit seminars and I'm not wasting one on fucking _Chaucer._ " 

Bev shrugged. "Plenty of us take classes for fun, Rich. What's the point of spending an extra decade in school if you don't get to enjoy it?"

What was the point, indeed. Richie sometimes felt as if he'd lost the plot a long time ago. But he felt like that most of the time, anyway - it had stopped bothering him _several_ bad boyfriends ago. 

Richie's father was a distinguished professor of philosophy at Bowdoin, which made him a fairly fucking terrible conversationalist, and a very frustrating parental figure, for many reasons great and small. Richie's mother had had a promising start of her own in mathematics (quite the feat for a woman in the late 70s) but had put it on hold to have children, follow her husband around the country on professorship appointments, lose her passion for her work, grow increasingly bitter and cynical, et cetera. Richie's recent return to the field of obsolete academic research in topics not at all relevant to real life had brought them more parental joy than they'd experienced since his sister had popped her kid out. Richie was regularly contacted by various important people of such and such university or so what college to be congratulated on his as of yet nonexistent academic success, in varying tones of condescension, because his father had already bragged about him so much in every corner of the Ivies (Little, Public, and otherwise). There was nothing in the world quite so humbling than to be told by an eighty-five year old rhetoric professor from Harvard that "he always knew you could pull it together, kid." Richie and Bill had a Bingo card on the fridge to keep track of them all. 

The flipside of this though was that Richie did know a lot of useful people, which is how he'd conned his way back into academia in the first place. It wasn't that he didn't enjoy it - obviously, he enjoyed it. The idea of a doctorate had always been on his back burner, especially so in the really cold winters when Richie couldn't scrape enough gigs together to keep his heat above sixty degrees. The life of a grad student wasn't anymore secure or glamorous, but at least it was familiar - but it was also just really fucking intolerable. Maybe this was why Kaspbrak rubbed him the wrong way so strongly - because Richie liked him, sort of, and resented that he liked him, just like how he resented how much he liked everything else about his life as it was now. He resented that he was good at something his father wanted him to be good at, resented how at home he felt on a college campus, resented how easily it all came back to him - the office politics, the gossip, the obligations and the parties. He resented Eddie Kaspbrak's Chaucer poem most of all, because Bev and Bill and Ben were all right about him - he was talented and smart and maybe a kind, engaging teacher too. And Richie _really_ liked the angle of his shoulders in his stupid sweaters, and felt weird about it. (Talk about Freudian conflict.)

He had emailed a few of these useful, prominent people about Kaspbrak - trying to be subtle - and of course given the impression to several fairly significant literature professors that he and Kaspbrak were having an affair, which came back to bite him pretty significantly at a _soirée_ (Richie was informed this was the exact term, no others accepted) at the English Chair's house, which was ostensibly to celebrate the end of the fall semester but really was a good old fashioned debauched Christmas party. (There'd been some sort of dust up about six years ago about an incorrectly-lit Menorah, and now all the staff parties were non-denominational.) 

Richie had flirted his way through a crowd of his fellow junior PhDs (most of them were much younger and pretty terrified of these parties - Richie was more than happy to lead by example to put them at ease) and now was working his way through Dr. Clarion's open bar. His method was simple, tried and tested at the dorms of NYU: make yourself three drinks, tell everyone they're for your friends, then stash them in a corner and voila! You've gotten blasted _and_ avoided the kitchen at the worst, shittiest part of the night. 

"Is that a White Russian?" was Kaspbrak's opening line, sliding up to Richie's elbow at the counter island. "Disgusting."

"Better than spiked eggnog," Richie said. He turned to look, and of course - of _course_ \- Kaspbrak had his sleeves rolled up. Richie's neck went hot and he tried not to stare; the tattoos were bright and colorful, stylized designs that looked abstract takes on jungle animals, crawling up his forearms beneath the cuffs of his Oxford. Fuck. "What do you drink, Dr. Kaspbean?"

Kaspbrak's nose wrinkled, but he didn't acknowledge the dig, which was pretty worn thin by that point anyway. Also beneath Richie, if he were being honest. "You can't drink beer like a normal person?"

"This is a Christmas party. Of course I'm not drinking beer."

"It's actually a soirée to celebrate the _winter solstice,_ " Kaspbrak said, with just enough subtle derision in his voice that Richie had to bite back a laugh. Seeing this, Kaspbrak lightened up every so slightly in response, his heavy brow smoothing a little, his shoulders loosening. "Who's the other drink for?"

Richie had only made it to the second glass. Something in Kaspbrak's tone made his hands slow on the bottle, and he lifted the highball, shaking the ice around to loosen it. It had started to cling together with condensation as it melted. He saw Kaspbrak's eyes follow the movement. "Well, you, obviously."

Kaspbrak's mouth twisted. "Does that work for you often?"

Richie shrugged, abandoning the vodka mid-reach and picking up a bottle of Tanqueray instead. "You seem like a gin guy to me."

"Don't tell me _that_ works for you either."

"Who says I'm working?" Richie said. Dr. Clarion was married to a surgeon and the scuttlebutt was that she'd tripled her inheritance from her grandparents on the stock market, so she never spared any expense. She had a full wet bar, complete with a bunch of little glass dishes with garnishes in them. Richie had plenty to work with, here. "Do you like grapefruit?"

"I already have a drink," Kaspbrak said, sounding annoyed, but he didn't walk away or tell Richie no, exactly. He just stood there and watched Richie mix him a cocktail, still out of the corner of his eye, with his fucking hip watercolor tattoos just out there in the open. Richie felt like a Victorian gentleman, scandalized at the blatant display of bare ankle. "You're not gonna put anything else in it? Not even any soda water?"

"It's a Greyhound, Dr. K," Richie said, presenting it to him with a flourish. Looked pretty snazzy, if he said so himself. He'd even found some rosemary in one of the dishes to garnish it with. "I tended bar for a while, you know. Try it."

Kaspbrak looked suspicious, but he traded his mostly-empty ginger beer for the fresh drink, and by the look on his face as he sipped, he was moderately impressed. "I don't usually drink at these things, you know."

Richie snorted. There were as many social events as there were actual classes, in graduate school. Kaspbrak floated through all of them with glazed eyes and a slow demeanor that Richie would spot a mile away. "Yeah. Smart not to mix."

Kaspbrak looked startled. "What do you - "

"Hey, no judgment. Spend six years writing a PhD thesis in _Berkeley_? I'd be more surprised if you didn't come out of that with a new vice or two."

"Just the one," Kaspbrak said, for the first time sounding closer to a normal guy than he did to a high-strung, anxious mannequin. Richie wondered if this was what he was like as a teacher, what Bev had meant when she said he was _engaging._ "I've been trying to be subtle about it. Yale, you know - "

"Oh please. Clarion and her husband literally have orgies here," Richie said, and Kaspbrak choked on his drink. "You didn't know? There was a big thing last year because they got involved with an undergrad. Everyone knew about it. And then there's Bennington in the philosophy department, who _knocks up_ his undergrads - "

"God. Please stop," Kaspbrak said, looking pained. "I don't know that I want to know."

Richie thought that was pretty stupid. "You wanna go in blind?" Richie took a long drink of his White Russian, determined to finish it and make himself another before they got edged away from the bar by the crowd. "Your funeral, Doc."

"You can't - they're my colleagues," Kaspbrak said, sounding adorably scandalized. Richie was dismayed to realize he found it charming. "I do have to look them in the eye every day."

Richie, a former latchkey kid who'd spent most of his childhood running wild through the ivy halls of a much smaller campus with a much higher concentration of scandals, laughed. "That's cute. That's really cute. Is this what you wanna do, Doc? Get on the tenure track, teach medieval poetry to rich teenagers for the next four decades? A word of advice - better to know what everyone's talking about, than to ignore it. You don't have to take it seriously, but you still better know what it is."

"That's pretty cynical," Kaspbrak said. 

"Well, your other option is," Richie trailed off leadingly, gesturing subtly with his drink towards Dr. Brighton, an elderly, tenured professor of anthropology who was currently staring into space, humming to himself as he literally contemplated the wallpaper. He had fallen asleep mid-lecture three times that semester. Guerrero had told him the Dean had asked him several times to retire, and was now contemplating less polite methods of persuasion. 

"Jesus," Kaspbrak said faintly, sharply looking away. Richie couldn't help but laugh. "You must know what they're saying about you and me, then."

Richie was a little impressed by his bluntness, if for no other reason than because Kaspbrak looked fairly embarrassed by it. It occurred to him that maybe Kaspbrak was _shy,_ which was absolutely fucking thrilling. "That we're going to town on each other on every flat surface in LC Hall?"

Kaspbrak looked like he was blushing, which was also just an incredibly wild revelation. Richie downed the last of his drink and set the glass down sharply, his stomach jumping. "Tanya Smith-Patel, back at UIUC - she gave me the heads up. You've got kind of a loose tongue, don't you, Tozier?"

Richie shrugged, trying to control his expression. He was sure it was currently locked somewhere between _fuck this fucking guy_ and _Teenager Who Has Just Experienced His First Public Boner_ at the current moment. "So what? I've got some friends."

"A lot of friends," Kaspbrak said archly. 

"You can't blame me for wanting the gossip about you. You breeze in here with your sweaters, and - "

"Breeze?" Kaspbrak said faintly. "Sweaters?"

" - well, you have to admit you're kind of a dick sometimes. We didn't get off on the best foot. I just wanted to see what other people thought of you, that's all."

"You weren't exactly the most welcoming," Kaspbrak said.

"I'm a _student!_ You're the professor," Richie argued. "You could've been nicer."

" _You_ could've been nicer," Kaspbrak shot back with a glare. "You have no idea, do you - no. No, you really don't," he continued, shaking his head sharply in some kind of disbelief. "Talk about walking around blindly. Do you know how difficult you've been making it for me? I mean, I know you don't _care,_ but I at least thought you were doing it on _purpose._ "

At this, Richie was truly bewildered. "What?"

Kaspbrak snorted. The look on his face was faintly bitter, but his tone was almost - _admiring._ "You're very well liked, here."

Richie shrugged. Maybe. Maybe not.

"Half the department's in love with you, and the other half is terrified of you," Kaspbrak went on bluntly, to Richie's bemusement, "and before you say it, no, it's not just because of your father. Although - I'm sure that's part of it, for the dinosaurs." Kaspbrak gestured, far less subtly, back at old Dr. Brighton. "I mean, Jesus Christ dude, you were on _Saturday Night Live._ "

Richie blinked. "I only did fifteen episodes - "

Kaspbrak snorted. "Right, and that's less impressive? And you say _I_ breezed in?" He shook his head in visible amazement. "The only son of Dr. Wentworth Tozier, who casually spent ten years goofing off on television, only to roll up at _Yale University_ with a fully-funded six years to study whatever he wants? Okay. Sure. You didn't know." He shook his head, this time in a very familiar sort of disdain. "Like I said. In love, or terrified. There doesn't seem to be much of anything in-between that I've noticed so far."

Richie bit back the urge to ask: _and which are you?_ "I think you're giving me a little too much credit. I did write my thesis on Heyer, remember?"

"You're kidding, right? The thesis, you mean, that you wrote while whipping through an MA in half the time, six months before getting hired on that TV show - I don't remember the name, the one where you played Tina Fey's boyfriend - well, look. I've heard the stories. Several times." Kaspbrak sounded frustrated. "I knew you didn't like me, okay, and I thought you were snubbing me on purpose. To make everyone else snub me. Then I heard these rumors from Tanya, and - "

"And what?" Richie felt a little out of his depth, to say the least. To hear himself described as some sort of, what, _trendsetter_ from an outside perspective? A voice of _social authority?_ It felt surreal. There was a reason Richie always avoided reading reviews of his performances like they'd send him straight to hell. "All I did was email a few people about you. I wanted to find some of your poetry, that's all. I don't know what you think you're accusing me of, but you gotta relax, man. It's not whatever you're thinking."

Kaspbrak was holding himself tightly, gripping his drink with almost white knuckles, still not looking at Richie directly. It occurred to him for the first time that this might be because Kaspbrak was _nervous._ Because Richie made him _nervous._ This was almost as thrilling as the watercolor tattoos. "Wrong foot. Clearly."

"Well, yeah." Richie tore his eyes away from the tattoos, with effort, and started mixing himself a drink. He grabbed the first bottle his hand found, which turned out to be dark rum. "You like Dark and Stormys, Dr. K?"

"I hate rum," Kaspbrak said passionately. "Were you really looking for my poetry?"

"I read the New Yorker one. Hated it."

"Of course you did," Kaspbrak said darkly. 

"The Chaucer one was better. More developed ideas. I was looking for more but - "

"I haven't published much, since Berkeley," Kaspbrak said, shifting uncomfortably. "Can't you just call me by my name?"

"Sorry. Doctor _Kaspbrak,_ " Richie said, sloshing beer into his glass. He was then instantly terrified he'd given himself away, just by knowing how to actually say it. 

"No. Eddie." Kaspbrak downed his own drink, and slid the glass across the counter. "Will you make me another?"

"Sir, yes sir." Richie bent to get a clean glass for him, trying to distract himself while he considered the idea of thinking about Kaspbrak as "Eddie." Eddie, with his sweaters. Eddie, proper noun. Derivative of "Edward." People also search for: _Edwardian._ "Why haven't you published?"

"I publish critical work."

"That's not an answer," Richie said, thinking of the fellowship. He made two Dark and Stormys, thinking of Eddie's ginger beer at the beginning of the conversation, which he'd made a point of finishing before accepting the Greyhound. "The only good gossip I got about you was your fellowship. Which, depending on how melodramatic your source is, was either a very boring five months in New Jersey, or the academic scandal of the century, hushed up by your powerful, mysterious benefactors."

"I think, out of the two of us, _you're_ the one more likely to have powerful, mysterious benefactors," Eddie said. He sounded a little amused, actually, even though his expression was still set in annoyance. "What did you hear about my fellowship? Exactly?"

"Just that you didn't publish anything, and that seems weird to some people," Richie said honestly. "You did use the money to write, though. Right?"

"I did," Eddie said. He seemed to be deciding something, thinking so visibly that Richie could practically see his gears turning. "I actually - I did get an offer to publish a book. My mother asked me not to. So I pulled out at the last second. Pretty much ruined my relationship with my literary agent, so that door's probably closed for now."

"Your mother?" Richie said. He was no stranger to contentious parental figures, obviously. The look on Eddie Kaspbrak's face, however, seemed much too tender, too raw for this to be a normal, _yeah my old man doesn't even understand what I do_ conversation. "She didn't like what you wrote?"

"Yeah. To say the least. I wrote a memoir." His jaw worked back and forth for a second, fastidiously. "She didn't come off...well, in it. I made the mistake of trying to warn her first."

This was quickly spiraling into a much more personal conversation than Richie had expected. Being fairly terrified of intimacy, at the same time that he craved it so much his fingers tingled, Richie was torn between dragging him off into a dark corner somewhere and running away. "Do parents ever do? In memoirs?"

"Yeah, well. I put a little too much of our dirty laundry in it, let's say."

Richie hummed thoughtfully, and handed him his cocktail. Eddie still didn't look him in the eye, but their hands brushed. Richie could almost see him shiver at the contact, but then again - he had an overactive imagination. 

"Were they pissed? The fellowship - it's intended for a specific project, right?"

Eddie shrugged. "They probably weren't overly impressed with me, but I mean - I did finish it." He took a long drink, his eyes hovering somewhere near Richie's navel. Richie tried not to clench his stomach muscles in response, his back itching. "I'll publish it someday."

After she's dead, was the implication. Richie took his own long, leisurely drink, wondering if he was reading either too much or too little into this. Maybe both. Probably both. 

"Do you want to get some air with me?" Richie blurted, before he could change his mind. Eddie's shoulders twitched. "I'm parked down the street."

Eddie paused for a long time, before he answered. "Does _that_ ever work for you?"

"I don't know. Does it?"

Another pause. Richie felt every second dragging painfully, every millisecond. He was overly aware of his hands, and his body, and of Eddie's hand, resting casually on the counter just inches away from Richie's elbow. 

"Yeah, okay. Fine," Eddie said, after another awful silence. As the Lady herself would say, _in half agony, half hope._ "Let's go. Bring the booze."

"Sir yes sir," Richie said, unable to say anything else. Dimly, he thought of the time he accepted an invitation to Martha's Vineyard from Tracy Morgan's assistant and ended up trapped at a bed and breakfast with the man himself as he spent three days coming down from a bad acid trip. This was not the outcome Richie had been hoping for at the time, which had been a romantic weekend with said personal assistant, who in the end turned out to be straight. (And married.) 

At this point, Richie figured this similarly impulsive decision could really go either way. No wedding ring? Sure. But Richie was too old now to take that on faith. Fuck, he really should've done more Googling. 

There was a walking path through Clarion's pretentious little garden that they detoured through, daring each other silently to drink every time they made eye contact. Eddie, visibly shuddering at the taste, seemed bound and determined to finish it, which was impressive in a frat boy sort of way. Richie was man enough to admit that it was working for him. 

"So you wanna read my poetry," Eddie said. 

"I do." Richie couldn't come up with a joke for that; he really did. He was surprising himself with how earnest he was about it. 

"Do you write? Creative writing, I mean."

"No. No no no. I mean - stand up sets. But that doesn't count."

Eddie gave another one of his elegant, disdainful shrugs. "I think it does."

Richie didn't know how to feel about that statement, and so they fell into silence. Clarion's ragers were famous on campus; inevitably somebody left in tears, or forgot their underwear in the coat closet, or ran through the living room with dog shit in their hair because they'd passed out on the garage floor while tripping balls on New Year's. ( _Someone's_ never gonna live that one down, Dr. _Nathan_.) The garden, naturally, was where people went to cry or give blowjobs, but since it was still early in the night, it was mostly empty. "So you know my dad?"

"Not personally. But everyone knows who he is."

Richie was still feeling slightly surreal, and a little too seen, by Eddie's description of him earlier. "He is...intimidating. But in a dinosaur kind of way. I mean - Bowdoin College. It's prestigious, but small." Just like his parents, Richie thought uncharitably, and then instantly felt bad about it. 

"Maybe to you," Eddie says ironically, and then tilts his chin sharply, quickly changing the subject. "You can read my stuff if you want. I'll show you whatever."

"Gracious of you. 'Show me whatever.'"

"I meant that as an olive branch, FYI. Do you have to be flippant about everything?"

"Is that why you don't like me? You think I'm this fuck off nepotist who doesn't care about anything?"

"No," Eddie said evenly, "I know you're smart, and dedicated. I don't think they let you in because of your father."

Richie didn't reply, marveling at his own reaction one more time. Apparently the implication there had offended him more than he'd thought. 

"And I never said I didn't like you. I said I thought you didn't like _me._ "

"Well, that's not true," Richie said blankly, a little hot under the collar. 

"Good," Eddie said firmly. 

"Good." Richie drained the last of his drink, hoping it would go to his head. It had not, so far.

"Tell me about your dissertation," Eddie said. The sentence every PhD student loved and dreaded. Richie took a deep breath, and then was cut off before he could even launch into it by Eddie's sharp head shake. "No - tell me why you chose what you chose. The real reason."

Most people, in Richie's experience, set out to get PhDs to establish themselves somehow. To make themselves attractive to universities for potential teaching jobs, or to angle themselves into good positions to apply for grants. It wasn't rude or gauche to talk about this openly - most practical grad students did - but it _was_ sort of gauche to admit that you didn't desperately need to get a teaching job after graduation. It was the inverse of New York City - in grad school, everyone was poor. Even the rich kids. 

Richie wasn't wealthy, but he had an inheritance waiting in the wings. His mother's father had been a senator, and Dr. Tozier wasn't poor by any means either. His sister was a lawyer, and she'd married a guy who did something-something in finance, so they were fine. Both his MA and his PhD were funded. He didn't have student debt. Compared to what most of the other students in the program were facing, Richie might as well have had a yellow brick road to stroll down, complete with well-connected parents and some hip TV gigs that still sent him occasional residual checks. 

"I wanted to impress a guy," Richie said honestly, blurting it out before he could change his mind. "That's why I applied, anyway. I always bragged about how I made a bet with myself that I could get into Yale, because when I was younger - well, you already know I'm a dick. Anyway, I met this guy, and I was in love with him, and he was an artist. One of those real New York types, with the part time gallery job, the huge studio in Manhattan his parents paid for, the works." Richie shook his head at himself. "I don't know what I thought would happen. Have you ever had one of those train wrecks? You know what I mean, right? You know what it is, from the very beginning. You know you're being shit on. But you like the fantasy of it so much you let them break your heart, just for that one-in-a-million chance your instincts are wrong."

Eddie looked serious, and a little wistful, as he regarded Richie. He was looking him in the eye, finally. Richie felt a zing of some triumphant emotion, deep in his chest. "Yeah. I think everyone's had that."

"Not everyone. The people who do the stringing along - they've never been on the other end of it. Otherwise they wouldn't keep doing it."

"I don't know. Pain makes people mean, sometimes." The look on Eddie's face was deeply tender, again, and Richie looked at him for a moment, his hands itching to touch, and allowed the silence to sit. Then after a second, Eddie took a breath, and shook his head. "So - Dadaism. You still want to impress him?"

"No. I mean - I wouldn't have pitched it to Guerrero if I weren't interested in it."

"No, yeah, obviously. I just meant - "

"Am I still hung up on him?" Richie asked, amused. "Also a no." He shrugged. "I'll say this for the asshole - he did teach me a lot about art. And it seemed like there hadn't been much work done on that connection - Duchamp and Jasper Johns, you know, the visual artists, and the writing of that period - Best and Kellner called them the _theoretical_ bridge between modernism and postmodernism - but who talks about Dadaism in the literature itself? The themes that show up in the actual works? Humor, spontaneity, irrational behavior - "

"Those things themselves aren't inherently Dadaist," Eddie interrupted, looking amused. Richie grinned meanly at him, egged on the way he always was by Eddie's sharp, relentlessly practical way of looking at things. "I would think your main obstacle - and the reason not a lot of academics have written on this specific intersection - is that you're going to have a hard time connecting broad themes that show up in numerous literary movements with a very niche, highly visual political art movement like Dadaism."

"It's distinct," Richie argued. "I'm not saying every joke ever written down in a novel is Dada."

"Right, but - "

"The surreal humor and irreverence is what I'm talking about. You have to admit that that empty, almost nihilistic surrealism shows up frequently in both modernist and postmodernist literature. Magritte? Borges? Even Virginia Woolf, for fuck's sake - "

"I'm not saying there aren't clear examples of it, but mostly in poetry, don't you think?" Eddie's face was sly. "Tzara himself wrote 'How To Make A Dadaist Poem', didn't he? Pull words out of a hat, right?"

"Ideally, a top hat," Richie agreed, and then laughed. "Look at you, dropping names. I thought you were a fucking medievalist."

"Early Modernist," Eddie corrected, "and I read a lot. Just like you. I am interested in literature for its own sake, you know. You're not the only one."

Richie looked away, a little put out at the light scolding, even though he probably deserved it. Well - definitely deserved, he thought. "Point taken."

Eddie was smirking, when Richie glanced over again. "Are you going into theory?" he asked. "God save me from Foucault. My PhD adviser made me read all of that shit, one summer. I nearly jumped out my window."

Richie laughed again, feeling a little lightheaded, and more content than he remembered feeling in weeks. "I kind of like it. Lit theory, I mean."

"Of course you do. Your dad is a fucking philosopher."

Richie just smirked at him. "Why did you choose what you chose? For yours."

Eddie sucked his bottom lip into his mouth, which drew Richie's eyes. He lost his train of thought momentarily, staring at the hint of white teeth that appeared, an indent into soft flesh. "I wrote about the _Canterbury Tales._ "

Richie hadn't actually known that, but also - he sort of did. "Right. Why?"

"It was the first poem I ever read that made me want to rewrite it," Eddie said. He paused by a flowering hedge, reaching out to touch one of the larger blossoms, gently pulling the petals free from a thorn that had overgrown on top of it, pressing it back into the greenery and threatening to crush it. Richie watched him rearrange it carefully, pulling the flower free without killing or stressing the vine it was growing from, all the while feeling something very fragile, and very new, deep in his chest. "I like the history involved. The further back you go, the more background you need to consider the work in context. You can hardly hand a freshman a copy of _Paradise Lost_ and expect them to understand it just by reading the text itself. You have to be a historian, as well as a poet, to really give the artists their credit."

Richie smiled at his back. "Yeah," he said, "and that's exactly why I hate it."

Eddie laughed. "That makes sense about you," he said, and turned around. Richie felt out of breath, seeing the wide open look on his face. "Anyway, I read Canterbury when I was, what - eighteen? My first year of college. This terrible Brit Lit intro class, with a really bad professor. But you know how it happens, right? You're sitting in your dorm, and you turn a page, and you find something that changes your mind. It's a beautiful thing. So I wrote about it for my dissertation. It seemed obvious, at the time."

"And it doesn't now?"

"Maybe. Maybe not," Eddie said. He bit his lip again, guilelessly. Richie felt pretty guiled. "I think, if I could go back and do it again, I'd choose something else. Something braver."

"You think there's something cowardly about Chaucer?" Richie asked. He grinned. "'The dart is set up for virginity / catch it who can, who runs best let us see.'"

Eddie stared at him. "Did you just - " he shook his head. "From memory?"

"I read a lot too, Eddie. I'm a very serious PhD candidate."

Eddie flexed his hand once, then twice, his jaw working back and forth. He stared at Richie's face for a moment, his eyes dropping quickly down to his mouth and then back up to his eyes, bouncing up and down like a rabbit. Richie waited, holding his breath - for what, he wasn't sure - but then Eddie blinked, and turned away sharply. Richie could hear him letting out a long, tense breath - he could see the cloud of steam it created in the air, floating up above Eddie's head in the darkness. 

"Come on," he said, after another tense moment (of agony, of hope), "you said you had a car."

"Down the street," Richie said numbly. 

"I sure fucking hope you have the keys," Eddie said forebodingly. 

Several possible icebreakers occurred to Richie, in the short, tense walk to the car. Among them were the cliche: _have you ever been with a man before?_ the sentimental: _I've been thinking about this for awhile, you know,_ and the gentle: _it's okay if you don't want to do anything. It's been an intense night, we've both been drinking, I can call us an Uber._ But Eddie, as was becoming a habit of his, cut him off before he even started by shoving him up against the door and sticking his tongue down Richie's throat. 

"Fuck," Richie said in surprise, and then - considerably more muffled - "fuck. _Eddie._ "

"Am I reading this wrong?" Eddie demanded, pulling away as suddenly as he'd latched on, his chest heaving a little. The combination of liquor, hot breath, and cold air was making Richie a little lightheaded. "We can stop."

Always stealing his lines. "No," Richie said, "I just - you surprised me."

Eddie seemed to withdraw a little at that, but Richie caught him before he could retreat entirely, cupping his hands around Eddie's face and holding it steady for a kiss. Eddie's mouth was warm and wet and his tongue tasted like rum. His hands trembled a little from the cold, and Richie shivered a little as he slid them beneath the folds of Richie's jacket, trying to warm them. Shit, it was the middle of December, and all Eddie had on was a sweater. A Victorian gentleman, Richie was not. 

"Inside," Richie mumbled, his stomach jumping. "You're cold."

"You're not," Eddie mumbled back, a bit incredulous. "Do you have a fever? How are you so warm?" He kissed Richie's adam's apple, then the apex of his throat, nuzzling his cold nose against the patch of skin above his shirt collar. 

"I think the line is 'how are you so _hot,_ ' Eddie."

"I dunno, I guess I was just born this way," Eddie said smoothly. 

Richie laughed, a sound which quickly turned into a yelp when Eddie's teeth got involved. "Fuck, fuck! Inside! Shit, where are my keys - "

"God, you're annoying," Eddie said, and Richie jumped as he felt him reach into his front pocket, pulling out the car keys. 

"A little familiar there, Professor Kaspbrak," Richie said, holding back a giddy laugh. 

"I could see them through your jeans, idiot."

"You've been looking at my crotch, huh?"

"You kept - _thrusting_ it at me," Eddie said, and then frowned irritably when Richie let out an incredulous peal of laughter. "Jesus. Was _none_ of it on purpose? You've gotta be kidding me. I really cannot stand you."

"I think I'm the luckiest bastard in the whole world," Richie said earnestly, and then yelped when Eddie shoved him towards the back door. 

Richie felt like a teenager, folding himself into his own backseat, and there was a comical five minutes or so as they both struggled with the controls on the front seats, trying to push them up to get more room. Eddie applied himself to this task with honor and valor - "oh, my courtly knight," Richie said, laughing again when Eddie smacked him - and then they were in business. Eddie seemed to be doing his level best to crawl into Richie's lap despite the size limitations of the backseat, and Richie laughed again, tilting his head back against the seat and grinning up at his own ceiling while Eddie then proceeded to apply his intellect to Richie's belt. 

"Do you laugh the whole time?" Eddie asked, lifting his head to kiss Richie's cheek, a sweet move that nearly made Richie catch his breath like the heroine in one of Miss Heyer's Regencies. (Richie had picked that for his thesis mostly to piss off his dad, but had found himself earnestly admiring her by the end, for personal reasons that kept continuing to be embarrassing, even now, years later.) "Wait - of course you do."

"I could make you laugh, Eddie," Richie said, "if you let me. Isn't this fun? Necking in the back seat? You're not the type of guy who goes all intense and quiet, are you?"

"If you would shut up for two seconds, I might let you find out."

"No, I didn't think you were," Richie said, running his hands down Eddie's chest, taking his time with the curves and the angles. Even over his sweater, he could feel the hard muscle, the tempting give of warm skin. It'd been so long since he'd been with anybody. Since his ex, really. An ill-advised hook up with the secretary of the President's office didn't even count, especially since they'd been interrupted halfway through by the man himself. Richie was not planning on telling Eddie how close he'd come to exposing himself to the President of Yale University anytime soon. Or ever. "What do you like, then? I like listening to you talk. Tell me."

"I'm not good with dirty talk," Eddie muttered, thrusting his hips a little in frustration. Richie hissed a breath through his teeth. "My ex - never mind."

"No, what?"

"You're not supposed to bring up exes in bed," Eddie said, shaking his head, "not that this is a bed."

"Let me sober up a little, and I'll take you home," Richie promised, "I do have a roommate, but I think he's gone this weekend. Mom does his laundry."

"Are you - is that a bit? I can't tell," Eddie asked. Richie laughed. "No seriously - do you really live with an undergrad?"

"You're so cute," Richie said, and kissed him again. Eddie made an indignant sound, muffled against Richie's mouth, and Richie thought, _oh well I say ya got trouble! Right here in River City!_

"Condescending," Eddie said, when he pulled back. "I'm older than you."

"No way - you can't be. Not by much."

"I'm actually like seventy-two," Eddie said, and yanked on Richie's belt hard enough that it finally opened. Richie saw the face of God, very briefly, as Eddie's hand undid the zipper. "But I take a lot of vitamin zinc."

"Is that a metaphor for something?" Richie asked, humiliatingly breathless. Eddie laughed, muffled against Richie's jaw, and rubbed the head of Richie's dick through his boxers. The windows of the car were already fogging up, Richie noted, and then Eddie squeezed him ever-so-slightly, and he very quickly stopped noticing things. 

"You never told me what you liked," Richie said, lifting Eddie's sweater only to find a very primly tucked-in shirt, which made him grin. Eddie shuddered as Richie pulled it free, wiggling his hands beneath the cotton to find bare skin. 

"I like anything. I haven't - whatever you want," Eddie said, clearly struggling. He was straining against his khakis, practically rutting against Richie's leg. He'd abandoned the handjob path when Richie pulled him further into his lap, moving his hands to brace against the seat instead, on either side of Richie's shoulders. 

"I want what you want. I want you to tell me what you want." Richie, for his part, was perfectly happy to just dry hump for the next hour and then go home with blue balls, if that's all Eddie wanted to do. He felt very much like a teenager, at the current moment. Or a much more respectful version of his teenage self, maybe, he thought, nuzzling the warm spot beneath Eddie's ear. 

"Just touch me," Eddie said, angling his hips desperately. "I haven't been - not since - "

Richie kissed him before he could say something he might regret later, after the fog passed. "What, baby?"

"Oh, don't call me that - "

"What?" Richie repeated, slowly, " _Baby?_ "

Eddie scowled, which made Richie laugh again, and his face was just softening into a smile - _the first!_ Richie thought - _the first he'd seen!_ \- and then something changed in his face, and he jerked his head to the right, and then a fucking horrendously bright light flashed outside the window and made them both startle so badly the car rocked back and forth on its wheels. 

"Fuck!" Eddie said, and toppled over, hitting his head sharply on the opposite window. Richie cursed too, realized his dick was still out, and started to scramble, and then there was hysterical laughing outside the car. The light flashed again. "What the fuck? Who - "

"Marlena fucking Rayburn, I'm going to call your motherfucking parents!" Richie thundered, having recognized the cadence of the laughter with a sinking feeling. Outside, a very drunk literature PhD candidate studying race, queerness and the intersection of both in Southern Gothic fiction was shrieking with laughter, shining her cell phone light through the window and dancing back and forth in her bare feet. "Eddie - baby, hold on - "

"No. No," Eddie was saying, yanking his clothes back into place - "is that an _undergraduate_?"

"What? No, she's PhD track - it's just Marlena, Eddie - Marly, _fuck off! I mean it!_ \- Eddie, come on, don't - "

"Nope!" Eddie thundered, clambering - with feeling - straight out of Richie's car. Richie cursed again and kicked the seat. Marly was still laughing outside in one direction, and Eddie was striding away - the _passion_ in his stride, the _purpose!_ \- in the opposite direction. Richie zipped up his pants, his heart pounding, and thought: _right. Laughing girl on one side, angry hook up on the other. Just like high school._

"Was that _Kaspbrak_? Oh my _God_ dude!" Marly demanded, shrieking with laughter again when Richie swiped at her, trying to yank her back into the car so he could give her a noogie. "No, I'll cry rape! Your cooties are all over that backseat!"

"Where the fuck are your shoes?" Richie said, torn between real concern - seriously why the fuck was she barefoot in the snow - and real anger. Marly was twenty-five and hot headed, impulsive enough that she and Richie got along like a house on fire, but she also did coke on the weekends with her townie boyfriend and had a habit of bursting into hysterical tears when he didn't text her back fast enough. "What the fuck were you doing? Are you serious, dude? I was in the middle of something!"

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" Marly said, still struggling with laughter. "I thought it was JJ and Luke! Remember you said you were gonna loan him your car tonight?"

Richie groaned. 

"It was just my flashlight, I just wanted to scare them. Was that seriously Kaspbrak?" Marly laughed again, still hopping back and forth in her bare feet on the cold pavement. "Dude, he is _so_ hot. Good for you."

Richie had a somewhat sobering realization that he was, technically speaking, a student, and Eddie Kaspbrak taught in his department, and had some measure of authority over him, academically speaking. And not ten minutes ago, they'd been gearing up to mutual handies in the backseat of his car, currently parked down the street from the Chair of the English Department's house. "Marly - "

"I won't tell!" Marly said quickly, eyes going wide. She snapped her mouth shut and made a cross motion over her chest, which didn't come off too sincerely, considering she was still giggling. 

Richie pinched the bridge of his nose. "Marly, please tell me where your shoes are."

"Um," Marly said, looking down at her feet. Richie noticed for the first time that her hair was falling out of its bun, and she was wearing what appeared to be a man's coat over a bra. "Okay so, I _might_ have been in the garden with Max - "

"You were hooking up with Max?!"

"Bev dared me!"

Richie was too old for this. "Get in the fucking car, Marly."

"You're not gonna go after him?" Marly tugged on Richie's shirt. "I think I saw his dick, Richie. Like his actual cock. You _gotta_ go after him."

Richie decided to ignore that, for the time being. "You left Max in the garden with your shoes?" Richie said, then paused. "Why the hell did you take your shoes off to hook up in a fucking garden in December?!"

"You seem really into my shoes," Marly said, still giggling madly as Richie guided her into the car. She stumbled a little and cracked her head on the top of her door, making Richie flinch violently and grab her arm, but Marly barely even reacted, lifting a sluggish hand to her head and laughing again faintly. "Oh yeah. Oh yeah, okay, I think I've had a lot to drink, Rich."

"No shit," Richie said. "Let me take you home, kiddo."

"But Max is - he'll look for me," Marly said vaguely, gave up easily enough under Richie's eye roll, patting his face clumsily and mumbling something about how nice he was. 

He held himself stiffly as Marly folded herself gracelessly into the car, trying desperately not to look at or touch anything that neither of them wanted him to look at or touch, and made her promise him four times to tell him if she needed to puke before he would even get in the driver's seat. He was way past sober by the time he got on the road, and his blue balls were gone, replaced by a sick feeling that he'd probably fucked up, which only intensified when Marly spewed her guts all over his car a mere two blocks away from her apartment building. 

Nice, he thought. Sure. And for a moment there, he'd actually thought he'd been getting lucky. 

After the absolutely fucking miserable experience of cleaning vomit out of his car in the middle of the night in December, Richie spent an hour blearily composing a casual _hey what's up did I traumatize you tonight or what lol_ text to Eddie only to realize, somewhere in the vicinity of two o'clock in the morning, that he didn't have his number. Then, agitated and annoyed, tapping through the drunken Instagram Lives from his friends still at the party, he changed his clothes and walked down the street to Denny's. 

Over eggs and coffee, Richie dithered over a Facebook friend request, an email, and then - pathetically - a LinkedIn message, before cutting himself off (metaphorically speaking) and called his sister instead. Being a mother of a newborn, she picked up almost immediately, which was nice. Being his little sister though, she immediately started laughing at him, which was _not_ nice. 

"Only you. This story is _sooooo_ you," Carrie said. Richie frowned morosely down at his eggs benedict. "Literally why are you even calling me? Just go over there and fuck him! - Shh, baby, Mama's sorry, there we go, settle down - " her voice lowered to a hiss. "You're keeping my baby up, you baby."

"Your baby is gonna talk like Samuel L. Jackson by the time he's three," Richie shot back. "Does Brody censor himself still or have you beaten that out of him by now?"

"My husband knows how the sausage gets fuckin' made," Carrie said obliquely, and then proceeded to needle Richie about performance issues, which wasn't helpful. Still, Richie did feel a little better afterwards. The Tozier family love language was definitely 'verbal abuse.'

The other problem was a professional one, which descended upon him the next morning when Bill strolled in around eleven, in yesterday's clothes, promptly dropped his coat on the ground and yelled, "YOU AND KASPBRAK? CALLED IT!" and tackled him into the couch. Apparently, they had not been subtle. Unsurprisingly, it was all over campus by noon. 

No fewer than five people stopped him, on his reluctant trek across campus to the English building, only three of whom had been at the party last night, which was not a good sign. Richie told them all he didn't know what they were talking about, he hadn't been invited to any party, they must have confused him with that dork in linguistics, and when pressed by Bev - stopper number five, who also clearly had been waiting to yell about how she'd totally fuckin' called it Rich, in your stupid face - he faked amnesia and literally ran away from her. 

"Coward!" Bev yelled, startling a passing walking tour of high school students, wearing matching shirts and following behind a hip-looking teacher in a snapback. Richie waved over his shoulder and made vague, _oh, Lordy, I've been struck stupid by a falling piano!_ gestures at his head. He could hear her laughter all the way past the front steps of the library. 

Eddie had office hours between two and three-thirty, which was something Richie had no particular reason to know but he knew it anyway, which is how he found himself waiting in line behind two freshman girls who kept looking at Richie, then making eye contact with each other and giggling. Eddie had popped his head out, spotted Richie and scowled, and said imperiously, "I have students waiting," before slamming the door shut behind a terrified-looking kid in a fuzzy sweater, so Richie was resigned to this. All in the name of love and blowjobs, et cetera et cetera. As he sat there, he wondered if his dad had had this much trouble wooing Maggie, all those years ago, at the party where they'd first met. A sock hop, or whatever it was they did for fun back then. 

Probably not. Wentworth at least had the advantage of statistics on his side. There couldn't have been _that_ many eligible bachelors at Bowdoin College in the late sixties. Even his tendency to trail off in the middle of a sentence because he'd suddenly lost interest in the conversation couldn't have been too much of an obstacle. (When Richie had discovered a medical textbook in the library in seventh grade, his mother had assured both him and Carrie that this had always been part of his personality and was not, in fact, a sign of early onset dementia. Richie had been relieved - and Carrie, disappointed. She was nine at the time and had thought 'dementia' was a type of superpower.) 

Eddie, very cruelly, made Richie wait until three-fifteen before allowing him past the threshold, at which point he made Richie stand there for another ten minutes while he _typed a fucking email_ while Richie fidgeted and squinted at the books on his shelves and tried not to roll his eyes. Finally, Eddie looked up and said, "you have five minutes."

"Seriously? This wasn't even my fault," Richie said. 

"She was _your_ friend," Eddie replied, "and you better fucking hope there aren't any pictures."

Richie scoffed incredulously and opened his mouth to say something mean back, but then he saw that Eddie was trying not to smile, so he picked up the softest-looking paperback on the nearest shelf and lobbed it at Eddie's head. 

"Hey!" Eddie was laughing, when he popped back up from his duck. "That's assault."

"No, it's cruel and unusual punishment," Richie said, and decided right then and there never to confess to another living soul, not even on his deathbed, that he'd stayed up until 4 AM stalking Eddie's ResearchGate page. "You made me sit out there for an _hour._ Do you know how much I now know about Abby C. and Kelsey G.'s opinions on all the girls in their freshman dorm? It's a lot, Eddie."

"Well, you didn't even come back to the party," Eddie said. "I figured you deserved it."

"I had to take Marly home! She was super wasted. Dangerous wasted. She puked in my car, Eddie."

"I mean, okay. But you could've come back," Eddie said. "I was embarrassed, I ran off. Then you disappeared. You didn't come to find me. What was I supposed to think?"

Richie sank down into the chair opposite the desk, slumping a little. "I wasn't sure if you wanted me to," he said. He gave in to the urge to fidget. "You know it's all over campus."

"I figured," Eddie said. He sighed. "We didn't think this through."

"No, not a lot of thinking, in the five minutes between when you walked up to me at the bar and then accosted me in the parking lot."

"It was more than five minutes," Eddie said. "Ten, at least. Closer to fifteen, if we're being generous."

Richie smiled wanly. What had seemed like a super cool totally rad idea last night now seemed kind of embarrassing and stupid. Contrary to what many people thought after watching some of his work on SNL, Richie did actually give a shit about his professional reputation. It was just that as a former (well, temporarily former. On pause, maybe. He was thinking about doing some sets on weekends, possibly) comedian, his "professional reputation" was often unfortunately overshadowed by his "anal sex jokes on national television." 

"I lost my head a little," Eddie admitted, leaning forward against the desk and folding his hands like some sort of concerned pastor, which Richie was also embarrassed to realize worked for him just as well as the sweaters and the tattoos had. "I do like you. I just - "

"Yeah. No," Richie said, shaking his head quickly. His chest felt scraped raw with humiliation. "It's - yeah. It's inappropriate."

"You're only in your second year. The department isn't so big that there isn't a possibility that I won't be selected for your thesis committee. Or to sit in on your defense. Assuming - " Eddie paused a little, clearly flustered, " - assuming they extend my offer here for that long - "

"They will," Richie said quietly. Of course they would. He believed Bev, trusted her opinion - he always had, even when he was trying to talk himself out of it. Eddie was a good teacher. An asset to the department. Yale was trying to stay hip and relevant, and Eddie was young, attractive, creative, and wrote wave-making essays comparing medieval poetry to punk rock bands. Of course they would offer. 

"Well." Eddie rubbed his chin, where there was a hint of five o'clock shadow - the only sign that he'd been as disheveled as Richie had, that morning. "There's also the fact that you might have to take one of my classes. I know you're not a poetry guy, but it could happen. Nathan is talking about taking some leave next semester, and he already asked me if I'd be willing to take one of his seminars if he does."

Richie sobered. His main coursework next semester, apart from a class on the Harlem Renaissance he was mostly taking for fun, was Nathan's seminar on postmodernist philosophy in American literature. If he had to take that from _Eddie -_

"Yeah." Eddie looked just as serious. "It's not for sure yet, obviously, but - I wasn't thinking last night when we - "

"I'm sorry," Richie interrupted, shaking his head. "We're the same age, and I didn't think about it. I should have."

"Well, we both should have." Eddie gave another one of his elegant shrugs, and Richie's chest squeezed tight. God, he was beautiful. His big expressive eyes, his angular chin. Richie had been holding back all this admiration this whole time, and now that it was out, there was no stuffing it back in. "I'm not very well versed in postmodernism, though. I was going to try to convince Guerrero to take that one either way. If that...makes you feel better."

Wonder of wonders, it sort of did. "Well," he said, lightening his tone, trying to inject some levity into this absolute fucking bummer of a situation, "this sucks."

"We could be friends?" Eddie said. He spread out his hands hopelessly, somehow managing to make the gesture itself seem wry. That wordless expressiveness, the casual way he conveyed so much just through the physicality of his face and his body, had to be what Bev meant by 'engaging.' Richie couldn't imagine sitting there in a classroom for fifteen weeks with him, no. There was no way on Earth he could survive it. 

"We're already friends, I thought," Richie said, to cover up the lump in his throat. "Or - at least, we became friends, last night."

"Right, but like - a fresh start, I thought. If we act very normal and boring for a while, the gossip will die down, and maybe we could - relax a little," Eddie said. "But if we're awkward around each other - if people see us looking shifty - "

"Right," Richie said. There was nothing like a confined group of sleep-deprived PhDs who'd been told a lurid story about a professor's cock. Rabies wasn't even as contagious. He took a deep breath. "I mean - we technically didn't do anything wrong. And if we did - we'd have to tell them where we were when we were doing that wrong thing, and what everyone else was doing at the time we were wronging - "

"Does Clarion really have orgies, or was that another bit?" Eddie blurted, looking like he'd been biting back that desperate question all morning. 

Richie smirked. "Eddie," he said, "I'm afraid you told me you didn't want to know."

Richie didn't have much experience in pining, but he was pretty sure he was gonna be pretty awesome at it. Being good at such a thing naturally meant that he was sort of low-key miserable all the time, but such was Richie's _raison d'etre_ : he was only ever good at things he didn't completely want to be good at. Lit theory, vacuuming, comforting Tracy Morgan - and now this. 

Eddie seemed to be handling it better than Richie was, strutting - no, it was more like _sashaying_ , Richie thought uncharitably - around campus looking dashing and sad whenever he caught sight of Richie, like the scorned gentleman in a period romance. The rumors were fierce as they always were, but since he usually made a point to stop by and make charming small talk - usually when Richie was standing next to Marly or Bev or - on one horrible occasion, a deeply skeptical Dr. Uris, who taught something inexplicable in physics - and after a couple weeks most people had convinced themselves that Marly had probably just been on uppers or something. 

So, Richie coped. He felt fragile and strange for the first few weeks, like he should be avoiding Eddie on campus but hesitant to be obvious about it, in case he hurt his feelings - and then one afternoon at a guest lecture he caught himself drifting off, staring at the back of Eddie's head, six rows in front of him in the auditorium, and he had the same moment of clarity that had jolted him out of previous funks, a sobering sort of realization that if he didn't get his shit together, people would notice, and start to talk. This was not the first time he'd had this sort of epiphany. He'd had it so many times in fact that it was, actually, becoming kind of old. 

When Richie was sixteen, living his latchkey existence among the collegiate backyards and living rooms of Brunswick, Maine, he found himself - mostly by accident - embroiled in an emotional affair with his father's junior teaching assistant, a twenty-year-old Texan philosophy major named Sam. Samuel Thomas Kroenke, to be precise, whose father did something very lucrative in sports entertainment, and whose stepmother was the main lead on a daytime soap opera. He and Richie had a very intense, sexless, eight month relationship that went up in horrible flames when Wentworth found out, having walked in on them curled up together on a lawn chair by the student lounge, taking a nap. (The most action Richie had ever gotten from that guy, sadly. Not that his father ever believed it.) Sam transferred to Wesleyan, Richie got sent to boarding school for the last two years of high school, and sixteen years later Richie still thought about his light blond hair and farmer's tan with a mixture of embarrassment and a faded, sunburnt sort of passion. 

When he was twenty, Richie found himself in a similar doomed thing with his roommate at the freshman dorms, an art major named Rabiah - just _Rabiah_ \- which had ended in a very specific, tragic kind of heartbreak when she'd adopted female pronouns and came out as a lesbian. Richie kept in touch with her, too, and remembered her performance art pieces at the midterm senior theatre capstone showcase with fondness. 

In his mid-twenties, there was a similarly sexless, doomed affair with a jazz guitarist named Veronica - the only woman he'd ever loved, really, other than his mother and his sister - and during his MA, there was Brennan (Irish exchange student - gave _amazing_ head - dumped Richie for his girlfriend back home). Nathan in LA, and Cal in Vancouver. And of course Jakob, the horrible artist (who could forget?). Over and over, the main consistent pattern seemed to be that Richie fell in love fast, and then hung onto the fantasy for too long. He was always the one being let down easily, always the one waiting for a text, always the one wandering after them eagerly, already braced for disappointment but unable to talk himself out of the hope that he would be wrong. 

He was tired of it. Thirty-two was too old to be getting wrapped up in homemaker fantasies with every cute guy he met - or at least, that's how it felt to Richie, who spent a lot of time scolding himself for his own romantic idealism. And of all people - a _professor._ The risks to both their careers aside (same age or not, gone were the days teachers could sleep with their students and get away with it - the rumors alone carried the risk of making them _both_ unemployable), one of the most solid pieces of advice Wentworth had ever given Richie, the last time he'd visited a year ago, was: "for God's sake, marry someone _normal._ A mechanic, or an insurance salesman, or something."

"Like you did, Pop?" Richie asked, rather pointedly. 

Wentworth rolled his eyes, like he always did, when Richie tried to one-up him. "Your mother's normal."

("Am not!" yelled an outraged Maggie, from the kitchen.)

"So normal it gives me hives," Went grouched. He itched his beard, a habit so repetitive that _The Bowdoin Orient_ had once run a cartoon of him doing it over a bowl of salad, with little flecks of dandruff falling down into the bowl, and captioned it _Dr. Tozier likes extra seasoning!_ Richie's mother had it framed in their living room. "It's tough, you know. If you're gonna stick with it and teach, that's a guaranteed five years at least when you're hopping around the country on short-term gigs - and that's assuming you're good enough to get hired every year - "

"Gee thanks, Dad," Richie muttered. 

"I'm just being honest! It's not the same as it was when I was starting out," Went said. As frustrating and circular as conversation with him could be, Richie did appreciate that his professional advice was always blunt and honest. It was probably the only thing they could talk about with each other without getting annoyed (which may or may not have been one of the reasons Richie decided to go back to school. He'd admit that in therapy one day, maybe). "Marriage is hard enough. You throw in distance and shit pay and everything else you gotta deal with in this profession, and it's even harder. No - find someone smart enough to avoid it all together, kiddo. Like a nice graphic designer, or something."

Since - at least - the late nineties, his dad had been urging Richie to marry a graphic designer. Richie wasn't completely sure that Went knew what graphic designers did, but he sure had a high opinion of them. "So _they_ can follow _me_ around for who knows how long? Five, ten years, until I get a tenure track job somewhere - and even then, it's not like I'll have much choice where it is - or if it'll even happen - "

"Bleak. Very bleak," Went muttered. Just last year, Bowdoin had eliminated three tenure track positions in the humanities alone. Word on the sidewalks was that the music instructors were next up on the chopping block - jazz guitar, vocal training, and all that. (Not like they'd been getting paid very well in the first place, that is.) "I think you're old enough that we can talk about this honestly, son, but you know - when you and Carrie were young - your mother and I had quite a bit of trouble. We almost didn't stay together, at one point."

"No," Richie said, gasping comically and feigning surprise. (The top-of-their-lungs screaming matches had clued him in around, oh, age seven or so.)

Wentworth just narrowed his eyes, like he always did when Richie was facetious. "It's different now, of course," he said, continuing on like Richie hadn't even spoken, "but back then it was just practical for her to stop working, when you kids came along. There wasn't any such thing as daycare, especially in some of the places we lived. And - I know how it sounds - but I had a better chance of stability than she would've had. I'm not saying it's right, I'm saying that's just how it was - "

Richie could practically recite this speech by memory, he'd heard it so many times. "Yeah, Dad, you're a real champion for gender equality, you were hiring women left and right, you had that poster for the ERA in your office for decades - "

"Okay, shut up," Went said, kicking Richie's chair. "I'm saying it wasn't fair. I'm saying, that if I could go back and do it over again - "

"You'da let her be the breadwinner?" Richie asked incredulously. He couldn't really picture it. "You woulda stayed home with us and cut the crusts off our sandwiches while she went off to campus every morning to teach?"

"I think I did a little bit more than cut your crusts," Maggie said, swaggering into the room with melodrama, which is how she did everything. All of Richie's tall, imposing broadness came from Maggie Tozier, who'd been the first girl at her school to letter in track - shotput, specifically - and used to intimidate the other campus wives by showing off her power tools in the garage at tea parties. "I also made you lemonade. Here - drink this, kiddo."

"What's in it?" Richie asked.

"None of your business, just drink it. I made it for you."

"Is it a smoothie?" Richie sniffed the offensively green liquid suspiciously. "Is there kale in this? You know how I feel about kale, Mom."

"For fuck's sake, Richard, can you be an obedient son for once in your life and just do what I tell you? It's got protein," Maggie said. She smacked Went's shoulder. "Went, tell him to drink it."

"Oh, here we go," Went said. 

"Why does it have _protein?_ " Richie asked, mildly horrified. "Did you grind up some chicken or something and put it in a smoothie?"

"It's not a smoothie. It's an energy drink, and - "

"Richie, just drink it so she'll shut up," Went said. 

"She's trying to _poison_ me," Richie said. 

"Both of you shut up," Maggie said, pointing aggressively with both hands. "Richie, it has _edamame._ Do you know what _edamame_ is?"

She was pronouncing it very incorrectly. "No Ma," Richie said, gingerly putting the glass down on the coffee table, "I ain't never heard of it before."

" _Edamame_ is very high in protein. You know I follow your Instagrams," Maggie said, a seemingly unrelated sentence that only made Richie freeze and tense up, like a small woodland creature caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck. "I saw that picture you posted with that artist fellow. I Googled him, Richie."

Richie eyed his father for help, who quickly looked away and covered his mouth with one hand, under pretext of scratching his beard again. Maybe that's why he did it all the time, Richie realized. 

"You Googled Jakob?" he asked cautiously. 

Maggie narrowed her eyes at him dangerously. "He's a _vegetarian_ ," she said finally, after a scary beat of silence. Went coughed, and covered his mouth with his hand again. "I've been looking into it."

"Looking into it," Richie muttered, rubbing his forehead. He was finding it hard to hold back an incredulous grin himself. He did love his parents - so much it was embarrassing sometimes - but being around them, in their company, always made him feel like he was on the edge of some kind of manic episode. Richie spent a week at their house in Maine every summer, and always came out of it feeling like he'd discovered a brand new type of clinical hysteria over the course of seven days and six nights. "You know, it's not serious with him. I didn't even think you - "

"Not serious, he says," Maggie interrupted, turning furiously to Went. "He's thirty years old and he thinks he doesn't have to get _serious._ "

"Jesus Christ," Richie said, with deep feeling. 

"Maggie, light of my life," Went said gravely, "please fuck off before our son dropkicks you into the backyard. You're giving him anxiety."

"Well, he came out that way," Maggie said. "It's hardly _my_ fault."

"Genes," Richie said, smashing his face against the side of the couch. "Hereditary. Family legacy - "

"Maggie, seriously, we were talking," Went said. 

"Fine, I'll just go fuck myself in the kitchen, where I _always_ am, I _guess_ ," Maggie said, flouncing back out of the room with flapping arms, sighing so dramatically that Richie knew she thought it was funny, too. 

Richie raised his eyebrows at his dad. "Normal, huh?"

"Don't call your mother that," Went said. "It's insulting."

Well, it was the thought that counted, Richie figured. As far as advice went. His dad's point was fair though - Richie knew plenty of divorced professors, or professors with sordid histories with other professors, or professors who'd given up on marriage altogether and resigned themselves to raising cats - it was, indeed, very bleak. Not an easy way to make a living for anyone, let alone for a married couple, whose careers often took them to opposite sides of the country, for years at a time. Richie knew that his dad was genuine, when he talked about how he regretted that his mother had given it all up for the sake of child-rearing - but, then again, his dad was a romantic. Just like Richie was. 

If anyone was the cynic in the family, it was Maggie, who had told Richie very bluntly, during the hullabaloo and scandal of his affair with Sam when he was sixteen, that it was fine with her if he was gay but she hoped he knew how hard it would be, and how badly equipped she was to help him. (Not a fun thing for sixteen-year-old Richie to hear, especially since they'd been in the process of _sending him away_ like some pregnant unwed daughter, but mid-thirties Richie, with a few dozen heartbreaks and a decade of New York City living under his belt, had a better idea of what she'd meant, and - more depressingly - why she'd been so afraid for him, back then in 1992.)

"Mad?" she said once, when Richie asked her about it, "no. Bitter? Yes. Plenty of those other vapid bitches got pity jobs from the college, I don't see why they couldn't have - "

"Jesus, Mom, you can't just call people 'vapid bitches'. It's not the 90s anymore."

"Oh, sorry, vapid 'female dogs,'" Maggie said, rolling her eyes. "Look, I - yes, I regret it. I could've had a much more enjoyable, fulfilling life - certainly a more intellectual one - if I'd been able to figure out a way to keep working. But people just didn't do that, back then. Wives just didn't do that. And there were times that I liked it, you know - having dinner on the table when your father got home, hosting all those stupid fucking parties - "

"Yeah, you always seemed really content," Richie said, rolling his eyes. The most frequent sound of his childhood - more than even than his sister's wall-rattling metal music or his dad's Bill Cosby stand-up vinyls - had been the sound of his mother muttering angrily in the kitchen, talking shit to herself about whoever it was she was being forced to host in the dining room. Many nights, when Richie was growing up, had found the three of them clustered awkwardly around the coffee table with Dr. Whosit and his wife Mrs. Whatever, all of them making small talk and attempting to ignore whatever Maggie was muttering about them in the next room. 

"I mean, I was," Maggie said, somber in a way she rarely was, post-menopause. "I love your father. I know we weren't perfect, Rich, I know we made mistakes and we fought in front of you too much, but we love each other now just as much as we did when we were kids. And we love you and Carrie to pieces, too. That was never in question."

Richie felt bad hearing this, as he always did when he was too flippant about his parents and accidentally thought something mean about them. "Yeah. I know you do, Mom."

"So listen," Maggie said, "when you settle down with somebody - whoever it is - you have to go into it ready to make sacrifices. That's true for any relationship - you can't expect to go to your favorite restaurant every night of every week when your husband hates the food there and would rather eat at home. What kind of relationship is that? So you go one night a week, maybe. Once a month. Special occasions - whatever. And if you love them - the real kind of love, married-people love - then it won't feel like you're giving anything up. It feels like a gift, something you get to do to make them happier." She shrugged. "But it's all relative. Small sacrifices add up into big ones, if there's something wrong. If it doesn't feel even. And also - what feels even to the two of you - what makes sense for the life you're building together - might not look equal to anyone else. But it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is the two of you. You're on a team, Richie. You strategize together, you navigate together. That's marriage. The love makes it worth it, but the work is how you survive."

Richie took a deep breath. "I don't know if I'm cut out for that," he said honestly. What he really meant, of course, was that he didn't know if he was lucky enough to find someone who wanted to do that with him. But he would never, ever say that out loud. He could never. 

"Well, that's fine," Maggie said, in her brisk, off-putting way. "The world's not gonna end if you stay single forever. It'd make us feel better if you had someone to take care of, though."

"You mean someone who could take care of me? After you and Dad kick the bucket?" (It was an old joke, at Tozier family dinners, that their wayward, comedian son Richie needed to find a rich husband to keep him in comfort for the rest of his days.)

"No. Both. Someone you watch out for, and who watches out for you." Maggie rapped her knuckles against his skull, making him flinch and swipe at her hand. "It's fun, you know. Taking care of someone, having them depend on you. You think your father would've made it a week without me? I proofread his papers, you know. Every last one."

"I know," Richie said fondly. The eminent Dr. Wentworth Tozier was somewhat famous for thanking his wife in his footnotes. It'd brought him a lot of good will in a lot of departments. "You could go back now. You know. If you wanted to. Teach high school or something, get your feet wet."

Maggie snorted. "I haven't even looked at a calculus proof in over twenty years, kiddo. But I appreciate the thought."

"Teach something else, then. I worry about you sometimes, you know - all alone here, when Dad's at a conference or something. You need to do something with your time, Ma."

"I do plenty," Maggie said definitively, and when she used that tone they all knew it was the end of the conversation. "You'll find it, babe. It's not like you're ugly or anything."

Richie laughed in surprise. "Thanks. Means a lot."

"You've got my child-bearing hips, too," Maggie said proudly. "And your father's delicate features."

"Okay, now you're making it weird," Richie said. 

"Well, I'm just saying," Maggie replied, and huffed. 

Did Richie even want to be in love? Sometimes, he doubted it. Carrie's husband was extremely boring and vaguely arrogant, sort of like one of the background characters in _American Psycho,_ Richie often thought - but he loved Carrie, that much was obvious. He cried at their wedding - just sobbed his blue-suited heart out as Carrie tearfully stammered through her vows. It was both deeply touching and intensely embarrassing, all at the same time. 

Bill was in love too, with a slam poet-turned-Broadway actress named Audra McSomething (McDonahue? McRib? Richie couldn't remember) who was always sending him "grad school care packages" filled with fancy candy and _hot chocolate in a jar!_ (Usually it was just Swiss Miss mixed with mini marshmallows in a ziploc bag, but Bill seemed to appreciate it.) When Bill was really frustrated with his "piece" - MFA students always talked about their novels like they were gigantic paintings - he would get melancholy and tipsy and video-call her, and Richie would grimace and subtract himself from the living room before they got into pet name territory. (She seemed sweet, at least.) 

Eddie on the other hand was not sweet. Eddie, as it turned out, was an engaging lecturer, and a supportive mentor, but a harsh grader, which many of the undergrads discovered upon receiving their final grades over Christmas, and the ensuing fracas was the talk of the hallways for the first four weeks of spring term. Richie found it all very funny - the long line of vaguely distressed students always waiting outside his office door was definitely entertaining - but to his dismay, this did not make Eddie any less attractive. If anything, it only made him hotter, somehow. (Richie always did have a thing for teachers. Let's call it "only vaguely Freudian" and leave it at that.)

He and Eddie had decided on 'friends,' Richie remembered, and having not seen him since an awkward encounter with him and Dr. Chen in the staff lounge the first week of classes, Richie turned up to his office hours one Thursday afternoon and bribed a sophomore to let him cut in line. Two girls in matching sorority sweaters gave him identical dirty looks, and immediately took out their phones - a very bad omen - but Richie reminded himself that he paid tuition (well, technically. His tuition was forgiven as part of his funding but _technically_ speaking, he did pay it. Kinda) just like they did and therefore had the right to partake of anyone's office hours he wanted to, so there. 

"Oh, it's you," Eddie said, when Richie slid into his office, winking at a startled, stressed kid with a mohawk, fumbling with a folder on his way out. "Did you - was there anyone in the line behind you?"

"No," Richie lied. The sorority girls could deal. "Am I interrupting, Dr. Kaspbean?"

"I thought we'd moved past that," Eddie said with a scowl. He waved vaguely at the chair across his desk, looking harried. "I still have, what, twenty minutes left? - did you seriously need to talk to me, or - "

"Uh, yes. I have a paper I could use some help on," Richie lied, again. He dug into his messenger bag and grabbed the first piece of paper he found, which was a flyer someone had handed him in the courtyard for a potluck dinner to raise money for something. "Was hoping you could take a look."

Eddie took the flyer skeptically, then Richie saw him quickly hide a smile when he saw what it was. "This is a flyer for the NCCGA, Rich."

"No, it's my paper," Richie said blithely. "I was looking for some thoughts. As one does."

Eddie flattened it out on his desk. "Okay, I have a thought: you're annoying."

"Okay so, I already knew that," Richie said patiently. "I was hoping for something a little more substantial."

Eddie hid another smile. Richie felt a little thrill at the here-then-gone flash of his teeth. "Do you know what the NCCGA is, Richie?"

"Uh," Richie said, "that'd be a no, boss."

"It's a club for college kids who play golf."

Richie looked at Eddie's face, then down at the flyer, and then back again. "Are you shitting me?"

"No. They play golf." Eddie turned the flyer around to show him the picture on the opposite side, which indeed did show a pimply-faced teenager in a pair of white pants, teeing off. "There's a group of kids that's trying to raise money to establish a league, or a tournament, or whatever they call it. If they raise a certain amount they can get recognized by the national chapter, and they get to compete against other schools, I think. They've been emailing all the faculty about it."

"Okay, well that's - " Richie snatched the flyer back. " - not quite as charming as I was hoping to be. Here, let me start over, I'm sure I've got some cooler flyers in here somewhere - "

"Richie," Eddie said, with a cute little laugh, "I do have students out there, don't I? These are my office hours. What did you need?"

Richie shrugged, feeling suddenly bashful. The truth was that he'd gotten a whim to do this, because he wanted to see Eddie, to sit in his office and talk to him for a little while, and that's all. Not much more thought had gone into it. "I really am working on a paper. It'll probably be one of my last normal ones - other than my dissertation, anyway."

Eddie glanced at the door, clearly torn, before he leaned back and raised an eyebrow. "What's it about?"

"Well," Richie said, "that's the thing. I haven't decided yet."

"For the philosophy class? Or the other one you're taking - I know you mentioned it - "

"Visual art of the Harlem Renaissance," Richie said, nodding, "and yeah, that one. I wanted to do something to connect the art with the literature, you know, to tie it back into to my research somehow, but I can't decide on a topic and the teacher is that lady from England who hates me, and she spends more time talking about the politics of the period than she does the actual work - "

"Ah right, Colette is teaching that one," Eddie said. "She's an art historian. She loves the geopolitics."

"And I got a splinter this morning and we ran out of filters at home so I had to use a paper towel so my coffee tasted funky and I'm bored with my classes already," Richie said, leaning forward on the desk and frowning exaggeratedly. "Can you write me a hall pass so I can go to the nurse's office? I could really use a nap."

Eddie was laughing, and trying not to, so obviously that the whole effect was devastatingly cute. Richie grinned at him. "Okay, I'll make you a deal - "

Richie flipped a pen off the side of the desk with his palm. "Deal!"

" - you let me deal with whoever's still waiting out there, and if you wait patiently, and don't knock over any furniture, when I'm done we can go get some coffee and spitball some ideas for your paper."

"I object to the furniture part," Richie said. "I require constant stimulation. Like a captive ferret."

Eddie dug into his top desk drawer, and then wordlessly threw a rubber stress ball at Richie's head. Richie almost bent backwards trying to catch it, laughing in triumph when he caught it just before it hit the ground. 

"Eddie," he said, "are you the type of person to stay late to see every student, even when it's way past your advertised office hours? Of course you are. Of course you're that teacher. I don't even know why I asked."

"Who's out there?" Eddie asked, ignoring him entirely. "Is it the kid with the tattoos? Brown hair, weird teeth?"

"No, it's two girls from Pi Beta Phi."

Eddie closed his eyes briefly, took a deep breath, and then squared his shoulders like he was readying for war. "Okay," he said, "get the fuck out. I'm a teacher. This is my duty."

Richie saluted him, and then yelled, "you're a _lifesaver,_ Dr. K!" on his way out. The girls watched him leave with wide eyes, and then immediately started whispering loudly as soon as he turned the corner. Richie respectfully pretended not to hear, and then escaped to one of the empty classrooms on the first floor to wait. 

They went to one of the townie coffee shops - too cheap and normal to attract many students - and Richie asked for decaf in an optimistic effort to keep his nerves under control, which predictably did not work. Eddie's hair was a little curly, growing longer now than it'd been when they'd first met, and he was wearing fingerless gloves that he told Richie had been a gift from a student. His phone kept pinging with notifications that he ignored, and when Richie finally asked him if he needed to answer he rolled his eyes and shoved it into his briefcase. 

"Just my mother," he said. "I can get back to her later."

Richie very carefully didn't react. "Sounds like it might be important, if she's texting you that much."

"She texts that much all the time," Eddie said casually. "She's just an anxious person. Don't worry about it."

This had the air of an Intense Topic, which was definitely a dating conversation and not a "friendly friends and nothing more" conversation, so Richie told himself to drop it. "I don't think my mother even knows how to text. I sent her a photo once and my dad called me an hour later so I could help her figure out how to download it."

"Sounds like a mom." Eddie sounded kind of wistful.

"You're not gonna ask about my old man?"

"Should I?"

Richie shrugged. "Most people are curious." His father had made a name for himself amongst the general public with a series of short, layman's introduction books on political theory in the early 90s, and for most of Richie's childhood had been a regular on a popular radio show in New York with a series of high profile leftists that had brought them equal amounts of fan and hate mail, when Richie and Carrie were in college. Both he and Maggie had dedicated most of their vacation time to various causes and campaigns as well, and Went had made some waves during the Clinton administration with some scathing comments on the deregulation of the financial sector in the New Yorker, which made for interesting additions to his Wikipedia page. Nowadays Went spent a lot of time being interviewed on podcasts and answering emails from young political operatives and doing Q&As on Twitter, which Richie had made fun of in his stand up act to varying degrees of success. They were, for better or worse, _very_ cool parents. "Once on a first date, when I was about twenty-two, the guy I was with spent the whole conversation asking me about Cornel West."

Eddie sputtered a little on a mouthful of coffee. "Did he get you _mixed up?_ He thought _Cornel West_ was your dad?"

"No, he definitely knew who my dad was," Richie laughed, "he thought I could get him Cornel's email or something."

"Could you?" 

"I mean, probably," Richie said, "but you have to be a little subtle about it."

Eddie laughed, gratifyingly. "It must be strange," he said. "Your father is famous, but in such a...niche way. And you're sort of the same, I mean - SNL alone - "

"Please," Richie interrupted, "I had less screen time than the fucking band."

"Still," Eddie said. "It's intimidating. You know I was intimidated, at first."

"My dad is," Richie said, and paused, trying to come up with the right way to phrase it. "He's a complicated guy. Real smart, obviously, so smart it was scary sometimes. Carrie and I didn't know how to talk to him about anything, when we were kids. So I guess we were intimidated too, in a manner of speaking."

"And your mom?" Eddie asked, and then winced, visibly realizing what a nosy question that was. Richie just laughed again. 

"She's even worse," he said. "They didn't have an easy marriage, and they were actually separated for a while when I was a teenager. Mom took Carrie with her to live with our aunt for a couple years, and I stayed in Maine with Dad. They told us it was because my aunt had just gotten divorced and needed the company, but we weren't stupid - we knew what was going on - "

"Yeah," Eddie said, wincing in sympathy. "Kids know."

"They do. And then I - " Richie thought of Sam, and sighed. "Something happened when I was sixteen, and my dad thought I was...being taken advantage of, by someone at the college. I wasn't! By the way. It was all very frustratingly innocent. But my dad was just blown away by it - I mean, he was more affected by it than I was. He sent me away to Putney for my last two years of high school - you can imagine how many strings he had to pull to get me in _there_ \- and he dragged Mom and Carrie back from Florida and made us all go to therapy, and he dropped half his course load and started taking sabbaticals so we'd all have more time together." Richie looked down at his coffee cup, thinking with a sad sort of embarrassment about that time, summers back in Maine with his effusively apologetic, awkwardly well-intentioned family, all of whom treated Richie like he was a trauma victim or something. And all of it over poor Sam, who hadn't even wanted to make out. "That was when he started getting into electoral politics. Going on CNN, doing interviews, that kind of thing. So yeah, it was strange. It felt like it was all because of me, even though - logically - I knew it wasn't."

Eddie was quiet for a moment, watching Richie's face with a thoughtful frown. Richie tried not to fidget, but it was always difficult to just sit there and be looked at, much less by someone so clean and crisp and handsome. "Is that why you went into comedy? You wanted to make a name for yourself separate from his?"

"I mostly wanted to piss him off," Richie admitted, and Eddie laughed. "That's a joke, but it's also true. I was good at it, but I also hated it. Like I had the time of my life on stage, but I was always waiting for it to end, in a way. Does that make sense?"

"Yes," Eddie said firmly. 

"He's a good guy. My ma, too. Just not easy to live with, that's all. And when I was younger, I gave them a real hard time for it," Richie said wryly. "But they're alright. A bit mellower now, in old age."

"Still pretty intimidating to the people you date, I'm guessing," Eddie said, with a weird tone to his voice that Richie determinedly did not read into. 

"Yeah, they _loathe_ my brother-in-law, actually. It's pretty funny."

"Your sister's husband?" Eddie asked, and Richie laughed, nodding. "Why?"

"He's a _banker._ " Richie grinned. "I mean, Carrie's a lawyer, but a respectable one - she works in immigration. The real thankless, noble shit. But Brody - "

"Jesus, his name is _Brody?_ "

"Yeah." Upon meeting Richie, Brody had attempted to bond via football - which naturally had not won him any points - and when that failed, he just laughed obnoxiously loud at Richie's jokes at dinner, which was sycophantic enough that everyone else stopped laughing at all in protest - even Carrie. The result was now that every time they all got together, Richie made as many loud, vulgar jokes as possible while Brody laughed desperately, and everyone else sulked into their mashed potatoes. Not fun. "Kind of a dweeb, but Carrie seems to like him. Hey - I'm sorry, I didn't mean to go on forever. I'm more boring than usual in the day time - you've mostly seen me way more drunk and in the evening, when I'm really at my best."

"You're not boring me," Eddie said, with a curious smile. "This is juicy stuff, you know. Family secrets of the Toziers. I could get a decent amount of likes on Reddit, spilling some of this shit."

"Feel free," Richie said, waving his hand. "Whatever you don't say, Brody will have already spilled it on Facebook. That's another reason they don't like him, by the way."

"Noted," Eddie said seriously. Richie blinked, and tried not to read into that, either. 

It took them, altogether, almost an hour to work their way back around to Richie's paper, which they both agreed needed to either fit into his thesis somehow or publishable on its own in order to make it worth Richie's time. Eddie was somewhat of a passive conversationalist - not that Richie minded, being an active one - but he wasn't boring either, because when he did speak it was usually either funny or insightful, and sometimes both. He talked a little about grad school - a little about his own PhD research - and a little about the mysterious "ex" he'd brought up in a significant way several times during their ill-fated tryst, who was a woman, apparently, and also had been Eddie's thesis advisor at Berkeley, which...explained a lot. 

"We got away with it, obviously," Eddie said. "But I suppose that's why - "

"Yeah, you don't have to explain," Richie said. "I get it."

Eddie didn't say anything else about it, but he looked a little more comfortable, hearing that from Richie. It wasn't fun to say it, nor was it fun to admit it to himself silently, but Richie figured they'd made the right call, if for no other reason than the fact that Eddie clearly had some baggage - serious _baggage_ \- about the issue. 

Still - friendship could be good. Richie felt better about it, after a date/not-date like this, when they could talk normally, on equal footing for once. It occurred to him several times, listening to Eddie talk, that they still didn't know each other that well. It also occurred to him, after feeling a wave of intense affection and sharp longing about the way Eddie kept brushing his hair back with the back of his hand, that that didn't really fucking matter, in regards to Richie's feelings. He was, if nothing else, a creature of habit: he'd never needed much incentive to get attached. 

The sad truth about Richie was that he did, of course, want to be in love. He did want what his parents had - even if it came with screaming matches and long estrangements and children who didn't know how to talk about their feelings. Eddie was a question mark in a lot of ways - dark and handsome and a bit mysterious, with how reticent he was to talk about himself - but Richie could feel himself making the choice, even as he sat there, scolding himself to stay detached. He wanted to fill in the blanks, and know all the details. He wanted to see Eddie's apartment, to hear the story about the mother, to read his poetry and the abandoned memoir. That his affection hadn't been tested yet didn't matter - that Eddie himself might not want it didn't matter either. Richie wanted it all anyway, and he'd never truly gotten the hang of talking himself out of it. Out of anything, really - smart and stupid ideas alike. 

This one, he figured, was really going to hurt. 

Spring turned into summer turned into fall again; Richie wrote his Harlem Renaissance paper on James Van Der Zee's photography and attempted to tie it into the rich visual imagery employed by the poets of the same time period with middling success, and got a C for his efforts, which was fair enough (not his best work). But Eddie read it, and said he was intrigued by Richie's comparisons, so that was kind of an ego-booster, he figured. 

Bev broke up with her long-distance boyfriend (some dickwad from her undergrad program) in May and so Richie was distracted most of the summer, dragging her up to the city to distract her, plying her with off-Broadway shows and fancy fondue bars until she stopped looking so run down and depressed. As a result, they suddenly found themselves in a rather intimate friendship (it was hard not to get intimate with someone when you were holding their hair back in a women's bathroom at a karaoke bar in Brooklyn, honestly) and so when Bill decided to finish his novel remotely and move in with Audra, Bev took his room without so much as a blink, and Richie didn't even have to clean the kitchen to show the apartment. 

Richie and Eddie continued to meet for coffee, in their quaint little townie diner, usually on weekends. It felt - embarrassingly - like they were sneaking around, because Richie didn't tell anybody about it. He was reminded more and more of Sam (Richie hadn't told anyone about him, either - maybe if he had, it wouldn't have been such a big deal with his dad found out) both in how precious the time felt, how Richie felt like he was getting away with something, being allowed to sit there with Eddie and listen to him talk - and also in that he felt a little ashamed too, because he knew that Eddie was, frankly, risking more than he was. A scandal would follow a visiting professor at the beginning of his career much longer than it would follow Richie, who had other options. This was the awkward truth that kept Richie from pushing - that, and how dodgy Eddie clearly was about _the ex._

Eddie's contract was renewed for another year - as if anyone had any doubt - and in September he gave a series of lectures on oral poetry in the Middle Ages that really got everybody's motors running, so to speak. Richie thought this was only partly because of the material, and mostly because of the fact that Eddie left two of his buttons undone while speaking, and by hour two his voice always got a little hoarse and his brow was a little sweaty under the lights, and well - he had five chili peppers on Rate My Professor for a reason, was his point. Bev sat in the back with Richie for most of these, doodling in her notebook and making dirty jokes under her breath, until one night in October when she noticed Richie wincing one too many times and gave him a searingly knowing look that was even more embarrassing than the one he regularly got from the department secretary when Richie showed up to bother Eddie during his office hours. 

"How did I not know he had tattoos?" Bev wondered out loud, arm-in-arm as they strolled through the courtyard, dodging tipsy underclassmen on their way back to the off-campus apartments. "I sat in a classroom with him for three months last year, and I never saw them. But I guess he stayed buttoned up in the daytime."

Richie winced again, just at the tone in her voice alone when she'd said _buttoned._ "I haven't seen them up close."

"Oh, haven't you," Bev said dryly. 

"I mean - I told you, it was dark. It was barely ten minutes. I didn't even get my hand all the way down his pants - "

"I think they're flowers," Bev interrupted blithely. "Did you see the green on his left arm? It looked like a vine."

Richie sighed, and leaned his head against the top of Bev's as they walked. In response, Bev straightened up, bearing his weight with grace, and squeezed his waist. "Beverly, I've been meaning to ask you this for some time now. Do you have any gay friends?"

"Other than you?"

"I would prefer men who come from money. No capitalists - you know how my folks are. But family inheritances, I could explain away. No redheads, and they have to be old enough to remember who Wham! was."

"Rich," Bev said sympathetically, "are you in over your head?"

Richie kicked a rock morosely, and didn't reply. 

Bev squeezed his waist again. "I'll ask Rhea to get me some phone numbers. She knows lots of people."

"I just need to get laid, I think," Richie said, with comical optimism. "Maybe that will get my head back on straight."

"Okay, I'm gonna hold my breath on that one," Bev said. 

Richie sighed, and kicked another rock. 

His first date was a bust; the guy spent most of it talking about his ex, and upon discovering that the ex was in fact the current _roommate_ (yikes), Richie faked an emergency call and bolted. His second was a friend of a friend of an ex-coworker of Marly's, who turned out to be a _big_ fan of Richie's dad, which never went well. (He only made it an hour into that one.) His third was a little better, but Richie was only a week out from finals and there'd been two weeks of back-and-forth schedule negotiating that cast a pretty stressed, mundane tone on the whole thing. They had a nice, inoffensive dinner at a local Thai place and walked each other to the bus stop at which point they boarded different buses and then never spoke again. 

Richie was still meeting Eddie for coffee on a fairly regular basis, throughout all of this. This was a not-insignificant part of the problem, maybe. 

"So, I published something," Eddie announced that Saturday, with the wobbling tone of someone who wasn't sure how this sentence was going to be received. Richie was used to this, since Eddie talked like that all the time when he wasn't lecturing. It was endearing in a very frustrating way. "A poem."

"Where?" Richie asked immediately. He'd only gotten to see scraps of Eddie's creative work, here and there, and Eddie had put his foot down about showing him the memoir. _You'll read it when everyone else does,_ he'd said. 

"Just an online lit mag. None of the big names. I don't even remember what it's called," Eddie said. "But you can read it, if you want."

"Eddie, of course I want," Richie said, leaning his cheek against the window and making grabby hands, to which Eddie responded with a sharp knee to Richie's thigh. "Ow! Harsh."

"I emailed it to you already," Eddie said. "No - don't check! I sent it from my personal so I knew it would get filtered to your spam. Check it when you get home."

"That's so sneaky," Richie said. "Very James Bond. Is there sensitive information in it?"

"I mean, yeah," Eddie said. "It's _poetry._ " He graced Richie with a lopsided smile, and Richie felt breathless, as he always did, when Eddie revealed the sweetness that always lurked beneath the sharp top layer of his personality. "Just read it when you get home, okay? I just wanted to tell you I sent it, so you'd find it, that's all."

More like, he wanted to gauge Richie's reaction, before telling him that he'd sent it, Richie thought. If he'd reacted differently, Eddie might not have said anything at all, and the email would've disappeared after thirty days, with Richie none the wiser. He narrowed his eyes at Eddie, onto his game. "Uh huh."

"It's not my usual style. Honestly I'm surprised they accepted it."

"I can't wait to read it," Richie said, with a little too much honesty, and Eddie looked away quickly, his mouth bunching in one corner, half-grimace, half-smile. Panicking, Richie tried to recover: "you can read some of mine, if you want. Well, not that I have much. Well - I have _one._ I had to write a creative piece for a class my first year and they told me I couldn't use any material from my stand up, so I wrote a fake SNL monologue from the point of view of Frida Kahlo."

Eddie blinked, and covered his mouth under the guise of rubbing his face, but Richie could see his incredulous grin. "You're kidding."

"I'm not," Richie said. "My concept was, 'what if Frida Kahlo was born in the 40s instead and became a counterculture comedian instead of a surrealist painter?' I got a D. Surprisingly, Dr. Guerrero was not that impressed."

"You are a deeply embarrassing person," Eddie said, too fondly for it to hurt. 

"Yes, I am aware," Richie replied gravely. 

The poem, which Richie dug out of his spam folder the _second_ he left Eddie's presence, naturally, was non-metered in free verse, which was surprising only if because everything else Eddie had written that Richie had gotten his hands on so far had been rigid in its adherence to form, so much so that the form itself became ironic. The Chaucer poem was interesting because it used the expectations of the rhyme and language against its reader - but pairing formal structure and outdated language with modern day slang was a very clever gimmick that really only worked once. Eddie's other pieces - a poem in the _Iowa Review,_ a short sonnet published in Berkeley's student literary magazine - were similar in that they used outdated styles to talk about modern day concerns - clever, very smart, a little pretentious - very Eddie. 

This, though, felt far more personal. It was untitled, but the Roman numeral for twenty-six was at the top, indicating - what, that it was part of a series? The twenty-sixth draft? The twenty-sixth page of the journal it was to be published in? Richie had to live with the mystery, apparently, because there was no added commentary or explanation, either. Not that it really needed any. 

XXVI. 

I carried it at my waist every day for a year, Ma, I  
carried it and held it and every morning when I left my room I thought of you.  
When he died he told me you'd get worse and Ma, I  
didn't believe it, didn't believe it. You were lying, but so was he and so was I, and Ma,  
did we ever have what we thought we had? Ma, did we ever know what we thought we knew? 

Ma, I went to his grave yesterday and Ma, I  
couldn't even look the angel in the eye. Ma, do you remember his hair in the sink?  
Ma, do you see the headlights when you close your eyes?  
In twenty years I'll never forget the red-wet snap when his knuckles were in your mouth -  
Ma, did it hurt when he hit you?  
Ma, did you even feel it? 

When I walk past a stoplight I stop and give thanks, Ma, I  
won't ever forget what you said that night maybe morning when he left. Ma,  
I think we turn people into ghosts ourselves, I think we remember the blood because Ma,  
without it I never would've noticed it was hurting. Ma,  
do you forgive me? Do you look at yourself in the mirror? Ma, do you love yourself?  
Ma, did you love the fear more than you loved me? 

In forty years when I'm dead, Ma, some guy in work boots will cover my face with dirt  
and anyway, it won't matter then if I get AIDS or not, will it?  
Ma, do you hear yourself? Ma, are you hearing me?  
I know you think I left when I left but I didn't leave I just walked away,  
which isn't leaving, but just a long commercial break. Ma, I  
can't do anything you want me to do, Ma I  
can't let go what you made me carry. Ma, I  
love you, despite and because, Ma, I do and I don't and I do. 

Please listen: I love you, Ma, stop talking to me.  
I love you, Ma; don't touch me. 

Richie read it three times, gobsmacked, and then said, " _Eddie_ ," out loud, sitting alone in his apartment, almost on the verge of tears. No wonder Eddie didn't want to sit there and watch him read it. No wonder Eddie gave himself an out. Richie read it for a fourth time and called Bev, his hands shaking, and when she didn't pick up he leapt to his feet and drank one of her Coronas standing up at the kitchen sink, knocking his knees anxiously against the cupboards and shivering in his bare feet. 

There was a weird sort of panic making his stomach churn, and as he stood there, debating another beer, Richie pulled out his phone and re-downloaded Grindr. By the time Bev called him back and immediately started stress-chattering about her oral defense, he'd already lined up a drink with some thirty-five year-old townie named Vincent.

 _Eddie,_ he wrote, in an email he composed the next morning as he took a circuitous bus route to ALDI, _I don't know what to say here other than to thank you for sending this to me, which feels like a stupid thing to write. Has anyone ever said that to you in real life, after you tell them something private about yourself? 'Wow, fucked up that your ex-boyfriend had a bad trip and attacked you in the shower that one time. Thanks for telling me.' I didn't mean to type that, but I'm leaving it in. Now you know something weird and intense about me too, if that helps._

_I lied to you that night when you asked me why I applied for the PhD program. It had nothing to do with Jakob, and honestly I didn't even like that guy that much. The truth is that I spent like ten years of my life trying to make my dad embarrassed of me, and it never worked. He only ever got prouder. He didn't really think I was funny, but he was impressed by the money I made and he liked that I worked hard. My sister brags about me to her uppity law friends, and she named her son after me. (Well, sort of. His middle name. His first name is Matthew, which is Brody's father's name, but I was still pretty fucking touched.) My mom taped all my TV appearances and plays them when she throws functions for the other campus wives, and their reactions are very hilarious, I'm told. It's sort of pathetic, how much I complain about them, because I'm so lucky, and I really am such a fucking idiot for pretending otherwise for so long._

_I applied here because I wanted to, and because I wanted to make my dad proud of me: there, that's the big secret. You probably already knew that about me, since you have a way of picking up on that sort of thing. I don't know what I want to do after I'm done, I haven't really thought that far ahead yet. I don't know how I got in here with such a good funding package, because I don't think I'm THAT smart, but I'm starting to realize that growing up with the parents I did - maybe I just have weird parameters for what "smart" means. I definitely don't think I'm any smarter than you are. (Bet you thought I didn't pick up on that one, about you, huh?)_

_When I met you I thought I didn't like you at first, which I now realize was probably a defense mechanism or something, because I really do like you so much, Eddie. I know that's intense too and I don't mean to make you uncomfortable, but it's true, I do, and I'm too old to fuck around anymore with this sort of thing. I turn thirty-three soon - did you know that? I'm actually like six months older than you are. Real adult life just has so much weird, unbearable irony. It's honestly much funnier than anything I ever said on television, but don't tell my old manager I said that._

_Once I finish editing this monster for ELH and submit the grades for my freshmen I'm done for the term, and then I'm going back to Maine to send the break with my folks. I haven't spent Christmas with them since I was like, nineteen, so it's kind of a big deal. Feels weird that it's been that long. It also feels weird that it's been over a year since that night, but maybe you never think about it. I don't think I want to know, either way. I need to stop having coffee with you, Eddie, and you don't know how sorry I am, if that hurts you. When I get back to campus in January I need to not see you at all for a while. I'm sorry. I have to. I'm sure you can read between the lines, here. I'm really sorry, again. If it's presumptuous to act like this is even going to affect you at all, apart from making you feel sort of awkward, then I'm sorry about that, too. I guess I'm still an optimist, despite my best efforts._

_I loved the poem, obviously, and I'm definitely not going to send you my stupid little Kahlo monologue now. It was bad when I wrote it, and I'm sure it's even worse now, three years later. Is it easier for you to publish shit like that when you don't know who's going to read it? Like, you don't have to read their responses and hear their thoughts on what you wrote, so you can just pretend you're performing for a brick wall? That's what it was like for me, when I was on SNL. It helped, also, that nothing I ever said on television was something that I wrote myself. I used to call myself a dancing monkey and honestly - it sounds bad - that was miles easier than what I'm doing now, writing down this raw, embarrassing shit in an email, so I don't have to say it to your beautiful face. I'm not a poetry guy, Eddie, mostly because I have no idea how the fuck you do it. That kind of bravery is way above my pay grade._

_Meeting you, and getting to know you, was a privilege, and I mean that. I hope we can be friends one day, in a real way. I still want to read everything you write, because you're incredible, but don't feel obligated. I wouldn't want to send it to me after an email like this, either. (That was a joke. You don't have to laugh.)_

_Richie_

He turned his phone off as soon as he sent it, and pressed his face against the window, his stomach churning. Three months earlier, on a Sunday afternoon when he and Eddie were drinking matcha and arguing about pop music, Eddie had stopped in the middle of a sentence to reach out and pick a feather out of Richie's hair, and Richie could still feel the touch of his hand sometimes when he closed his eyes. That night, over a year ago now, felt very far away - it felt ludicrous, like a dream, that he'd once kissed Eddie against the side of a car, had pulled his shirt up and rubbed his thumbs down his hip bones, had unzipped his pants and touched his warm cock. Surely none of that had actually _happened_ \- it was a dream Richie had once, wasn't it? A daydream. A fantasy. Richie never touched him, never had him even for a moment. 

Sam, Richie's sixteen-year-old scandal, had grown up to become a mildly successful murder mystery writer. He lived in Massachusetts now with his husband, who was some kind of dance teacher, and Richie had been reading his novels loyally for ten years, in airports and waiting rooms and subway trains. They'd exchanged forlorn letters for a year or so after Richie got sent to Putney before it trickled off, like most teenage romances did, and Richie still had a few of them saved, sentimental as he was. Sam was eloquent in a du Maurier way even back then - lots of lines about Richie's "dark eyes" and how much Sam missed his "beautiful, fragile hands." Richie had tried to channel some of that for the email, but he was an academic writer, not a literary one. He'd gone through it twice, removing a bunch of therefores and consequentlys. 

Hopefully Eddie would like it. Richie heard the lines from the poem floating through his head every time he closed his eyes: _when I walk past a stoplight I stop_ and _did you love the fear more than you loved me?_ He wanted Eddie to close his eyes and remember what Richie wrote at random times during the day, too. So maybe he was a poet after all. Richie felt like he had the ennui mostly down. 

Richie also had a date with a sleazeball, in roughly seven hours. He sighed again, pressing his forehead against the metal grate of the window. That he'd seen it coming didn't really make any of this any easier. At some point, Richie thought, you had to admit to yourself that you got yourself in the quicksand. Just walked right in and plopped your ass down in the middle of it. But of course, that didn't make it any easier either - it just made you feel kind of stupid. But, well - he was used to that. 

Richie turned off notifications for the Gmail app and spent a pretty terrible night with Vincent, who worked in construction and fucked like he was auditioning for porn. Limping home the next morning made Richie feel like a twenty-two year old art major again - walk-of-shaming home on the subway, regretting who he'd spent the night with, avoiding the eyes of the morning commuters and sneaking back into his dorm so he wouldn't wake up Rabiah or her girlfriend. Bev - to her credit - was much less judgmental than Rabiah had been when she caught him anyway, turning the corner in the kitchen and doing a double take at Richie's ragged appearance, a cereal spoon hanging out of her mouth. Richie gave her a narrow-eyed look and she held up her free hand, wordlessly promising not to be an asshole about it. 

"You want coffee?" she asked. "My aunt sent me some fancy flavored shit. I was just about to make a pot."

Richie collapsed at the kitchen table, and kissed her hand. "Yes please." 

Bev tugged it out of his grip and ran her fingers through his hair, scrubbing his scalp with her knuckles as she walked past. Richie laughed and felt a little better, listening to her mutter to herself while she made coffee, shuffling around the kitchen in a pair of men's boxers and blue, fuzzy slippers. 

"Bev," he said, when she collapsed into the chair next to his while the coffee pot started gurgling on the counter, "can I ask you a super weird question out of nowhere?"

"Sure," Bev said, and scraped the bottom of her bowl with her spoon. Her Lucky Charms had melted and turned the milk pink, which both she and Richie had agreed, during their very first week as roommates, was the best part of eating Lucky Charms. "I love weird questions."

"Maybe not a weird question so much as an intense question."

"Okay, this is feeling very philosophical already," Bev said. "Should I put on a bra?"

Richie smiled weakly at the joke. "Do you think we carry who our parents are, like, through the rest of our lives? Do you think it ever goes away?"

Bev put her spoon down, and looked at him. Richie blinked at her, trying not to squirm, and mostly succeeded. After a second, she reached out and touched his arm very gently, rubbing her fingertips against the bare skin on his wrist. 

"No," she said simply, and started eating again. 

Richie sighed. His head was pounding. "That's either depressing or inspiring, depending on who your parents are, I guess."

"Yes," Bev agreed, nodding. She held the bowl up to her mouth and slurped for a second, wiping her chin with the back of her wrist when she was done. "Your train back home is tomorrow morning, right? Did something happen?"

"Yes, but it's not about that. About my folks. I don't really want to talk about it."

"Fair enough." Bev propped her chin in her hand and looked thoughtful. Her bangs were falling in front of her eyes and she looked like a model - like she always did - but she also looked so approachable and soft that Richie had an urge to bury his head in her stomach and take a twenty-year nap, like Rip Van Winkle. "Can I ask you a question now?"

"Absolutely, but I'm not sure I'll know the answer," Richie said. "I'm not as smart as you."

Bev rolled her eyes at him. "Do you think people can ever really fall in love with someone who's been through the worst shit imaginable?" She delivered this sentence breezily, but Richie felt a chill down the back of his neck anyway, and sat up straight, blinking at her carefully-blank face. "Like - do they really love you? Or do they just feel sorry for you? Do they feel this sympathy for what you've been through, and want to take care of you, but deep down they don't really think you're as strong as they are? They don't really consider you an equal?"

Richie felt a sharp pain in his breastbone, like something had gone halfway down his throat and stuck there, jabbing into the inside walls of his esophagus and damming up all his blood right above his heart. "Yes," he said, putting as much gravity in it that he was capable of. "Bev, of course that's possible. I know it because I've done it. Do you believe me?"

Bev tilted her head a little and sniffed, leaning her chin against her hand. She dug her fingernails into the soft skin beneath her jaw and leaned sideways, not meeting Richie's eyes. 

He knew just as much about where Bev came from as he now did about where Eddie came from, which was "not a lot" and "specific but also vague enough to be worrisome." Not knowing what else to do, he reached out and took Bev's hand, holding it as gently as he dared. 

Bev sniffled once, and then smiled at him. "Okay," she said. "Thanks."

Richie leaned down and kissed her hand again and she laughed, a little tearfully, but sounding much happier than she had a minute before, asking her question. He really was very lucky. He had to get better at remembering that. 

He did make it another four days before checking his email - all the way back to Maine, a _wildly_ expensive Amtrak ticket and a miserable transfer in Boston - but unpacking his duffel in his parents's guest room, he gave into the itchy, desperate urge and collapsed in a pile of his own clean laundry, tapping the Gmail icon as his stomach dropped with nerves. He didn't know what would be worse: for Eddie to send him nothing? Or for Eddie to send him a long, angry reply? Either way, a series of _eight_ emails, in boldtype at the very top of his inbox, was not what he'd expected. 

The most recent two didn't have subjects, which didn't seem good, so Richie scrolled down and saw the first one, sent not even an hour after Richie had sent his. The subject line was: **what the fuck?** He bit his lip and opened it, but there was nothing in the actual body, which also didn't seem good. He almost didn't want to keep reading, but of course he was going to. 

**Where are you?** 1:47 PM  
E. Kaspbrak [edwardkfrank@gmail.com]  
to rttozier

It occurs to me that I never got your phone number. It also occurs to me that I don't know where you live. Do you even have an office? I know you teach. Do you even hold office hours? Moron.

 **Sorry** 1:57 PM  
E. Kaspbrak [edwardkfrank@gmail.com]  
to rttozier

Sorry, I didn't mean to call you a moron. But seriously where do you hold office hours, the STUDENT CENTER??????? Gross, Richie!

 **(no subject)** 3:18 PM  
E. Kaspbrak [edwardkfrank@gmail.com]  
to rttozier

SO you're not on campus, fine. So I don't know where you live and I never asked for your phone number, fine. Doesn't it feel weird that I don't have your number? That we haven't been texting this whole time? Fine. Fine, fine, fine. Everything's fine. This is my number: 217-555-1938. Can you text me? I'd like to talk to you. 

**(no subject)** 4:18 AM  
E. Kaspbrak [edwardkfrank@gmail.com]  
to rttozier

Thank you for what you said about my poem. I was really nervous sending it to you. 

**(no subject)** 7:20 AM  
E. Kaspbrak [edwardkfrank@gmail.com]  
to rttozier

Sorry I emailed you so early. 

**(no subject)** 10:58 AM  
E. Kaspbrak [edwardkfrank@gmail.com]  
to rttozier

I just finished giving the final for my Early Modern Lit class. You know I never told you this, because I thought it might be embarrassing, but that first semester I taught here I used to see you at the Classics Library a lot, and of course I knew who you were, because everyone knows who you are. One afternoon - maybe October - I was meeting with a student about their final, so it was a fairly involved conversation, and you were sitting on one of the couches by the door reading something, I don't know what. Looked like a novel, maybe. You were obviously waiting for someone, and I kept thinking, on and off during my meeting, who was it? Who's coming to get him, who's meeting him there?

At one point you leaned back and put your feet up on another chair, and the desk clerk threw something at you. A balled up Post-It, or something, and you laughed, and I could hear it all the way in the study room, through the glass window. Do you remember now?

After my student left I stayed in the room since I'd reserved it for most of the afternoon, and did some grading, and watched you. You read the entire book sitting there, and then you stood up and yawned, and looked at your phone and texted somebody, and then you left. Did you get stood up, or did I have it wrong - you weren't waiting for anyone? I've always wondered. What were you reading? You've told me your opinions on every book in the goddamn literary canon, but I still don't know what you read for fun. Will you tell me? 

Can you call me?

 **(no subject)** 8:45 PM  
E. Kaspbrak [edwardkfrank@gmail.com]  
to rttozier

Okay so you asked for space and I'm clearly disrespecting that, and I apologize. That's a shitty move. It would be totally fair for you to ignore me, considering that. But would you please just fucking call me anyway?

Richie, I'm not good at poetry because I'm braver than you are, I'm good at it because it's easier to say it in a way that I can wash my hands of it, that's all. You can write something artful and sad and maybe people who understand you will see that it's real, but not everybody. Most of the time they just say something like "oh, what a sad poem. Good work, Eddie! Great imagery." That's not brave. That's just literature. 

I axed my memoir because my mother asked me to, yes, but also because it's much harder to claim it's not really you when it's literally a book that says "hello, this is the story of my life." I know I'll publish it one day, but not yet. The least I can do for my mother is not make her read it, and I do really mean "the least."

You want space, I want to talk. It's like the worst, most clichéd breakup. I did the same thing you did when we met, you know, I told myself I didn't like you, that you were rude and arrogant, whatever. We both know why, and that it wasn't true. Richie, it's not that it might get awkward if we break up. It's not even about the gossip or the risks - it's about the fact that anytime I want to, I can log onto my computer and look up your course grades. It's about how I can email the faculty at any university you might apply to for a job and tell them you were an awful student, and they would believe me. It's about how I could walk into the Dean's office right now and tell them you plagiarized part of the paper you just published in Joyce Quarterly, and they'd probably open an ethics investigation, just on my word alone. How could you ever trust me, knowing that? How could I ever trust myself? 

I'm not saying Myra did that to me, because she didn't. But she could have, and she threatened to enough times when it went bad between us. I like to think I'm a bigger person than she was, and that I wouldn't torpedo your reputation because I was angry at you, or whatever. But I _could._ Can you ever really be with a person who has that kind of power over you? You have at least two years left of your program. I have no idea where in the world I'll be this time next year. Richie, what are we gonna do about this?

Please call me when you're ready. I'll stop emailing you now. I hope you enjoy your holiday with your family. Your father sounds like a wonderful man.

**Eddie.**

Richie let his phone fall to the floor and then carefully slumped until he was lying on the floor, smashing his face into the laundry and breathing deeply. He laid there for a long time, his heart beating fast, his head spinning. _Yeah, what are we gonna do about this, Eddie?_ he thinks. _What the fuck are we gonna do?_

Downstairs, his dad was watching a rerun of _Masterpiece Theatre_ , which appeared to be one of the Henry the Eighths judging by the dialogue Richie overheard, and reading a book at the same time. Richie slumped onto the couch next to him and reached out to tip the cover up so he could see it: it was the first _Hunger Games_ book. 

"I know, I know," Went grumbled, "it's not bad, though. You should read it."

"I did read it," Richie said. "The first one, anyway. I think the second one's out by now."

"That's why I'm reading this one." Went flipped it shut and regarded Richie sternly over the top of his eyeglasses. "So? What the fuck's wrong with you?"

Richie sighed heavily and slumped further down on the couch. "Pops, I'm in love with somebody."

"Ah, sorry to hear, that's too bad. Sit up though, dipshit, you're gonna ruin your back."

In rebellion, Richie slumped harder. Went huffed and grumbled and turned the volume down on the television. Helena Bonham Carter was lurking in a stone hallway onscreen, looking hunted, sweaty, and stressed. Richie could relate. 

"Who are you in love with?" Went asked patiently. "Is he a graphic designer?"

"Tragically, Dad," Richie said, "I don't think I will ever give my heart away to a graphic designer. Doesn't seem to be in the cards for me. Sorry."

"Well, you can't win them all." Went squinted at him again. "Did you fight?"

Richie huffed. 

"You should apologize to him."

Richie grumbled. 

"It's Christmas, kiddo, remember the grace of Jesus and tell your boyfriend you're sorry."

"I think he's an atheist," Richie said, and then went back to his quiet, annoyed muttering. 

"Jesus was not an atheist."

"Obviously I meant my boyfriend," Richie said sourly, and then scowled. "He's not my boyfriend, though. Yet. Maybe ever. I mean - shit."

"Rich," Went said, leaning over on one knee and beckoning Richie closer. Richie leaned over just far enough for Went to shoot his arm out - way too quickly for a sixty-year-old nearsighted man in a paisley sweater vest - and smacked Richie's shoulder with his paperback. 

"Uh, _ow,_ " Richie said. 

"Go mope in your room if you're gonna be like this," Went ordered, "What year is it? '96? I thought you got over this phase when you stopped picking your zits."

Well, if Richie wanted sympathy, he would've stayed upstairs and called Bev. "That's nice, Pops. Real supportive."

"Sit up straight, you're giving me a headache," Went complained, and turned up the volume. Richie glared at him, but straightened up anyway, and proceeded to watch two hours of Henry VIII Masterpiece Theatre, like a good, dutiful son, and he only made fun of the dialogue once or twice. (Maybe three times, but under his breath didn't really count.)

The thing about his family was that they weren't the touchy-feely types - obviously - but they were very comforting anyway when Richie felt low about himself, despite all of Carrie's best efforts to be annoying and mean instead (Carrie, being half Richie's height with a voice like an cartoon chipmunk, had never truly mastered cruelty, despite her profession. She usually had the unintended effect of making Richie giggle uncontrollably when she tried to insult him, which he imagined was even funnier in a courtroom). His nephew was old enough by then to sit up on his own and gleefully throw his food at people - Richie was very proud - and his mom spent most of the week complaining loudly about the neighbor's dog - apparently it had it out for Maggie's back fence - and Brody mostly kept to the living room and complimented the food, like a good son-in-law. So it was all very nice. Richie had three yelling matches with his dad over various topics, including: the right way to season meat, the year he was born (his birth certificate said December 31, 1976 but Went swore up and down that he actually popped out a few minutes after midnight on January first, '77), and which era of the Beatles sucked the most. Maggie and Carrie had clearly bonded over motherhood things since the baby was born, and colluded together to cut these fights off by thrusting baby Matthew in their faces before the shouting could get out of control (this worked _extremely_ well, especially on Richie, who was less than pleased to discover that he liked babies) and it was all just very...cool. And relaxing. And nice. 

Richie must have started at least six dozen text messages to Eddie, over the course of the week he was there. He sent none of them. This, understandably, was a significantly less-cool feeling. 

The thing was that he was right. The thing was - Richie trusted Eddie, of course, because he knew that Eddie was a thoughtful person. He'd sat there and listened to Eddie talk about himself without ever telling Richie any details, over the course of the ten months or so that they'd been going on coffee dates, and Richie never got bored of listening. He was snappish and kind of snobby - obviously he had a slightly pretentious taste in literature, but Richie didn't mind that either - but he was also thoughtful, and kind. He asked a lot of questions - fucking Socrates, Eddie just really loved that old Greek son of a bitch - and when they talked about work - Richie's research or whatever class Eddie was teaching, or just random shit they got onto - he helped Richie circle around into better answers, better thinking, more clarified ideas. They could be good together, Richie knew it. And more importantly: Richie wanted it. 

None of the things Eddie had mentioned were ever going to go away, though. Three years was a long time. Academia was a tough fucking place. Richie still didn't know if he wanted to stay forever, do what Bev and Eddie wanted to do - find a school, settle down, teach until he died. Maybe he wanted to write novels, like Sam did. Maybe he wanted to start one of those rich people foundations for childhood literacy. Maybe he wanted to go back to comedy. But could he do any of that, with Eddie, and tell himself that wanting to be with him wasn't part of the reason? And was that even such a bad thing? Would it sour it between them, if Richie made the bigger sacrifice, could Eddie bear it, having been through whatever the fuck happened with Myra?

On his last night in Brunswick, Richie went to one of his old haunts in high school, an under-18 "men's club" (really it had been more of an arcade when Richie was a kid, but everything in an Ivy town had to sound like it was made for old white men) that seemed to be catering mostly to graduate students now. There were groups of twentysomething dudes clustered around the pool tables, wearing suit jackets and expensive chinos, sneaking obvious sips from sleek, metal flasks. Richie was in a room full of future senators and businessmen - a familiar scene from his childhood, honestly. The whole place smelled like cologne and dark chocolate. 

So naturally, he brought his sister, who put a very girly clip in her hair and wore a bright red dress. The silent reactions in the room were _very_ funny. 

"Okay," Carrie said, leaning over Richie's phone. She'd teared up several times once Richie finally let her read the emails, and then berated him fiercely for leaving Eddie on read for this long. "Pro: he's perfect for you."

"Let's not get out of hand here," Richie groused.

Carrie typed it in anyway, ignoring him. "Con: he smokes weed."

"He only does edibles, and that's a fucking pro, excuse you."

"Until this substance is legal in all fifty states I am going to choose to ignore this line of conversation," Carrie said. "Pro: you have a lot in common."

"Also a con. Look at Mom and Dad."

"Con: he's sort of right about the ethics, here. Could he really accuse you of plagiarism with no evidence?"

"Probably not," Richie said, "but he was a little out of sorts when he wrote that. I'm guessing."

"So how do you feel about it?" Carrie asked logically. She was always like that - very logical. She'd responded to the mild chaos of their childhood by becoming extremely literal and pragmatic about everything. She'd even proposed to Brody, Richie heard, although Carrie told him not to mention it at dinner because apparently that was embarrassing for some reason. "That's really the only important question here. Say the worst happens, and you have a terrible, bitter breakup, and you both want to kill each other. Would you still trust him not to take a giant shit on your career? Be honest, Rich. Think about it."

Richie had been. It's all he'd been thinking about, actually. "It's not so different than the level of trust you need in any other relationship. Isn't it? You trust Brody with your son. I mean, he's Brody's son too, but you know what I mean."

Carrie was nodding. "It was really hard when he was a newborn," she confessed. "I didn't want to let him out of my sight. But Brody loves him too, and that's what makes the difference. I know he feels the same desperate, intense love that I do. He'd never hurt Matthew, not ever. He'd die first."

"See, but that's...not a great 1:1 example," Richie said. "Look at - Mom and Dad. She gave up her teaching career. Never published again, after she had me. Mom had to think it was worth it, to do it. But she also had to trust that Dad would continue to respect her. That he wouldn't turn into one of those professor husbands who treat their wives and kids like handbags, or experiments - "

"Ugh," Carrie wrinkled her nose. "Remember Dr. Schroeder?"

"Don't fucking talk to me about that guy," Richie muttered, chewing resentfully on a piece of ice. "And Dad had to trust that she wouldn't grow to resent him, and us. That she'd still love us even with all she gave up for us."

Carrie was picking up her cocktail glass and pressing it back down again, making an even circle of rings on the napkin with the condensation. "Yeah, I mean, I guess that's...love, Richie. That's what you do when you marry somebody. You trust that it's not going to go bad, and that if it ever does...that they won't use your vulnerabilities against you."

Richie stared darkly at the dim lights above the table, until his eyes went spotty and white. Tilting back his glass, he caught another piece of ice, and crunched it savagely, until his teeth ached. 

"You're talking metaphorically though," Carrie went on, "about a situation that's pretty literal. Do you trust this specific person, who has this very literal power over you, not to abuse it? That's the question. You need to answer that, before you send him anything back. It's the only way to be fair to him, and to yourself."

"I think I do," Richie said slowly, "but I think I'm more afraid that he doesn't. I think...I'm tired of telling myself that I don't deserve things, Carrie." He immediately grimaced. "God, I sounded like _Grandma_ just then."

"It was good, though," Carrie said, smiling so widely Richie could see the fillings on her back teeth. "Then go back to New Haven and talk to him, for fuck's sake." She tapped decisively on Richie's phone, and deleted the entire pro/con list. "Maybe it's good you didn't reply. It's a conversation that needs to happen in person."

"Great, so we ended up on: 'confess your feelings, maybe get rejected anyway?' Thanks. I feel great about it."

"Welcome to the real world, Rich," Carrie said, unsympathetically. "Us mortals have to climb out on the limb once in a while. Better get used to it, if you want to _deserve things._ "

"God," Richie said, effusively. " _Fuck._ "

Carrie nodded sagely. "Yeah," she said, with just as much feeling, and they both drank. It was nice to be home. 

One afternoon last March, Eddie had spent two hours at the coffee shop rambling about Edmund Spenser, which was attractive for the first twenty minutes until Richie got bored of Elizabethan history and tuned out instead. When he fell back out of his daydream and back into listening again, Eddie was scowling at him, having said several bizarre things to test Richie's attention. Failing all those tests, Richie tried the amnesia trick, which didn't work, and Eddie called him inconsiderate, and then Richie said, "well if you like Spenser so much why don't you just marry him?" and Eddie sputtered hilariously and broke into incredulous laughter so loud the entire dining room turned to look. 

Richie thought about that a lot on the train ride back to New Haven, trying and failing to come up with something to send in a text or an email. He knew it was an asshole move not to reply, but what else could he do? He had no words left. He had finally done it - gotten sick of _words._ Eddie probably thought Richie just wasn't looking at emails. Yeah - that was it. Richie was very busy and distracted by his loved ones and that was all. 

Fuck, Richie really had to make him laugh right away, when they talked. Eddie was always in a better mood after Richie made him laugh. 

Campus was never truly empty at a school as big as Yale - and plenty of kids stayed in the dorms over Christmas break, avoiding parents or exes or whatever other horrors awaited them, back in their hometowns. Richie always liked it best this time of year though - early January, before the bulk of the student body came back. Snow on the ground, wind in the air. His first year here, still shellshocked that he'd gotten in, clumsily moving from one life to another, he'd simply walked around for six weeks in a daze, expecting to see the restaurants and the buildings open and then getting surprised when they weren't. 

Richie sat on one of his favorite benches - just outside the Classics Library because he _did_ remember that day - and took out his phone. He'd had Eddie's number saved since the day he opened the emails, but he'd never sent anything. 

_yo eddie_

(Not his best opening.)

_Who is this?_

Richie took a deep breath. _I was reading a murder mystery my ex wrote. He writes under his stepmom's stage name now - Sam Hartley. wasn't waiting for anybody, I just made friends with the staff there and their couches are comfy. I get sick of my apt sometimes_

A long pause. Richie tried, and failed, not to fidget.

_Is that the one ex? From high school?_

_yeah. He friended me on fb a few yrs back. No hard feelings. Plus he's married now_

_Are his books any good?_

Richie laughed. Of course that was the other thing he would ask. _They're okay kind of derivative but that's what sells, isn't it? makes good money I think. Listen are you in your office_

_Yes. Why? Are you back on campus?_

_eddie what the fuck are you doing in your office, it's 7pm. The sun hath set, edward!_

_Motherfucker are you here or not?_

Richie tilted his head up into the snow and grinned. He wanted to remember this moment for the rest of his life. Snowflakes in his eyes, his ass sticking to the bench, cold wind at his back. The phone in his hand, lit up in the dusky blue of evening, a bright light that felt warm on his face. _ok ok I'm coming_

_Text me when you get here, I'll come down and unlock the front door_

"You know what that is? Chivalry," Richie said out loud. His voice echoed in the courtyard, satisfyingly.

Eddie's office light was on, and there was some funny/frustrating back and forth about which door was the "west entrance" - Richie hadn't gotten any better at cardinal directions, even with all his advanced schooling - until finally they happened upon each other, at one of the doors that opened up into the basement hallway. Eddie stood there with his big eyes, holding the door open, and Richie wanted to hinge his jaws open wide and just eat him. 

"Hey," Eddie said, a little warily, and smiled a little when Richie elbowed him in a friendly way, stomping the snow off his boots on the rug inside the door. "You look freezing."

"No shit dude, it's like minus twelve out there," Richie said, and Eddie frowned and hustled him up into his office, where there was a space heater sputtering beneath the desk and warm light everywhere, fuzzy from the dust on the light bulbs, but welcoming and friendly like no other office Richie had ever been in, on this campus. 

Richie had never been in here after hours. He felt kind of scandalous, taking off his coat right there in front of Eddie, like some kind of slut. His mind was running through a series of manic "slutty student/hot teacher" jokes like a hamster on a wheel, and he was determined not to let any of them slip out. Richie watched with a helpless kind of fondness as Eddie hung up his coat with an _actual_ hanger, straightening out the sleeves carefully. There was music playing from the laptop on the desk, and Eddie paused it with a loud tap on the space bar, clearing his throat in the sudden silence. 

"So, you came back early," he said. He looked up at Richie, but not quite at him - he seemed to be focusing mainly on Richie's right ear. "I hope not just for me."

"Not early," Richie said, shaking his head. "I love my family but more than seven days in their presence and I start going serial killer. Full on Ted Bundy."

Eddie quirked a half-hearted smile, and said nothing. 

"I like spending a few weeks here before everyone else comes back," Richie confessed. "You get a lot of work done. You know I have comps coming up at the end of the year - the first round, anyway. I have like thirty more books to read before May, minimum, and that's not even the part I'm stressed about."

"You're on track for them," Eddie assured him. "You'll be fine."

"Yeah, well." Richie sat down in the chair, and Eddie followed quickly to sit in his own, clearly ready to take Richie's cue for this conversation. "Done with regular classes, at least. From here on out it's nothing but free fallin', baby."

"It's the best part," Eddie said, a little wistfully. "You feel like a scholar, for the first time. You're gonna kill it, Richie."

Richie blinked, a little taken aback at the open praise, and Eddie's face twisted like he was embarrassed. A beat of awkwardness fell, and Richie swallowed a sudden lump in his throat. 

"Eddie," he started, but Eddie cut him off with a sharp intake of breath. 

"I'm interviewing for a job at Columbia," he said quickly, and Richie fell into silence, stunned. Eddie looked sheepish suddenly - almost bashful. "Sorry, I just - well, I applied for it, obviously, so I didn't just find out. But I got the call just yesterday. They invited me for a campus visit and guest lecture - the whole thing."

"Congratulations," Richie said, a bit numbly. "Columbia - impressive."

"Not quite as impressive as _Yale_ , but I doubt they'll want to extend my appointment another year anyway," Eddie said. "Bendingham told them he wants to stay until his twenty-five year anniversary. That's another six years. So no permanent position until then, and that's only if the funding holds. You know how it goes."

Richie blew out a long breath. "Oh."

"Yeah. I mean, I kind of had a feeling, with some of the things Clarion was saying," Eddie said wryly. "And I like New York. I spent some time there during my undergrad. Rich - don't read into it, I didn't - "

"No, of course not," Richie said, a little insulted. "Obviously it's not all because of me. Obviously."

Eddie rubbed his forehead. "Right," he said, sounding flustered. "Yeah. Obviously."

Richie swallowed heavily. "Eddie - "

"I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable either," Eddie blurted, and Richie glared at him. "Well, I didn't! Sorry."

"Can you just like, fucking can it for thirty seconds? Jesus," Richie said. Eddie held up his hands apologetically, biting his cheek against a smile. Richie couldn't help but grin back, despite himself. "I just wanna ask you something. I had like this whole speech, you know. My sister helped me write it down but then I left the paper at home - don't laugh at me - and on the train back I kept thinking, 'you know, Eddie would've made fun of me anyway if I tried to be romantic,' and anyway, you already know that I'm no good with this kind of shit - "

"I think you are," Eddie said, ignoring entirely Richie's dirty look for interrupting. "The message you sent me was good. I read it so many times - you really have no idea. Pathetic."

"I think I do," Richie said dryly, and Eddie bit his cheek again. "Eddie. Eds. I like talking to you, and knowing things about you. I want to keep doing it, but I didn't want to make you do something you weren't okay with, give you a sort of power over me that you didn't want. But - you already have it. Don't you?"

Eddie looked down at the desk, his face darkening. Richie saw that his hands were shaking, a little. 

"How else do people do this? I mean, fuck," Richie said, "how else do you meet people to fall in love with, if you don't meet them in the same places you go every day? The same bars and offices and campuses, or whatever. Eddie, I don't want to sound disrespectful of your very logical concerns but I've really been thinking about it, the past seven days or so, and I think - "

"Oh, here we go," Eddie said.

" - that you're just a big fucking worrywart. Don't you agree? Eddie? Are you a big worrywart who's afraid to get busy with me because it's _inappropriate?_ " Richie drew a frowny face in the air with one finger, twisting his own face into a frown so exaggerated it had to be at least a _little_ insulting. "I think that might be the answer here, Eddie. For you to get over yourself."

"Fuck you," Eddie said, laughing despite himself. "Don't fucking - delegitimize my concerns - "

"Wow, what an SAT word," Richie said, in a stupid voice he used to use to imitate politicans on Saturday Night Live. Eddie just kept laughing, burying his face in one palm. "Eddie, I'm kind of serious, though. Look at me." He waited until Eddie did. "I trust you. You hear what I'm saying? I trust you."

Eddie's laughter died away, and they just sat there looking at each other for a moment, caught in the truth as it stood between them. Richie felt as if he'd known where this was going from the very first moment, somehow. Like he'd lifted his head, and saw him across the bar, and realized, _oh, there he is,_ on some buried-deep level of his heart. 

"So was that the question?" Eddie finally said, a little hoarsely. 

"Was what the question?"

"Your question. You said you had a question," Eddie said. 

"Oh yeah." Richie snorted. "Eddie, would you - " he cleared his throat, " - like to get a cup of coffee with me sometime?"

Eddie waited a beat, and then raised an eyebrow. "What, like, again?"

"In a romantic way," Richie clarified. He smiled, feeling a funny, hopeful feeling coalescing in his chest. Richie liked New York. He _loved_ New York, actually. And it wasn't weird at all, for Richie to have met someone through school, and then start to date them after they left for another institution. People did that kind of thing all the time. Eddie couldn't look up grades at Yale from the campus of Columbia. Maybe they'd have to be a little discreet about it at first, maybe they'd have to keep the timeline vague, but - "At my apartment, maybe? Like, now?"

Eddie narrowed his eyes at him. "It's not - it can't really be that easy for you. It's not that easy for me, Richie."

"It can be that easy, though." Richie shrugged, grinning incredulously. "Eddie, aren't you tired of thinking all the time? It's such a chronic problem in academia. We think ourselves into circles. Remember that night when you dragged me out to my own car by my hair, like a caveman? Wouldn't you like to try that again?"

"I didn't drag you by your hair," Eddie said irritably. "I just goaded you for a while and you followed me. You were very easy."

"I am," Richie agreed, nodding quickly. "You wouldn't believe how easy."

"I didn't mean like that - "

"I did!" Richie said cheerfully. "Eddie, come home with me. Come see my apartment. I have lots of books there, and some of them even have poetry in them." He smiled at Eddie hopefully. "Don't you want to just follow the feeling sometimes? I can't promise it'll work out, sweetheart, but I can promise to do right by you. Before, after, whatever. Do you trust me? That's the question." Richie swallowed back his anxiety again, rubbing his palms against his knees, trying to look handsome and dependable instead of nervous and emotional, which is what he was. "Do _you_ trust _me_ , Eddie? That's the fucking question."

It was a cold-as-bones evening in January, and Richie was recently thirty-three, and Eddie was biting his cheek against another smile. Maybe that was the answer to the question. Maybe Richie didn't need an answer to the question. Maybe the fact that they were asking it all meant they already had it in the fucking bag. 

"You don't live in a dorm, do you?" Eddie asked. 

Richie laughed, and the sound echoed. "A guy could fuck around and find out," he said.

. 

**Author's Note:**

> regarding the inevitable factual mistakes here: i have a masters degree, not a phd, and this is a product of my existential angst about the decision on whether or not to apply to programs next year or not. i would also like everyone to know that when i sat down to write this i intended it to be porn. that it ended up here, with exactly zero (0) actual sex scenes, is very on brand for me. 
> 
> eddie's poem is by me, and i'm sure it's not as good as richie thinks it is, but for that, and the email letters, i owe a lot to the Paris Review's [PoetryRx](https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/columns/poetry-rx/) series, which is an advice column to poets, who prescribe you poems. (amazing.) also Kim Addonizio's [To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall,](http://diodepoetry.com/v9n1/content/addonizio_k.html) which has reached near-meme levels of notoriety at this point (which does not mean it is any less affecting than when I first read it in 2017). and bev's paper for eddie's class compared Sidney Lanier's [A Song of Eternity in Time](https://quod.lib.umich.edu/a/amverse/BAD0458.0001.001/1:6.14?rgn=div2;view=fulltext) to the punk band The King Blues's song [Underneath This Lamppost Light](https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/3530822107858775884/) (in case you were wondering). i have no idea how viable richie's disseration topic would be irl as i know next to nothing about the postmodernists or dadaism. but there really was a book published by two philosophy professors in 1991 that theorized that dadaism was the "turning point" of postmodernism and i spent a lot of energy digging up screenshots of that book so i had to include that here so that you know it too. you're welcome.
> 
> i love poetry and this was very self-indulgent! i hope you liked it. i will leave you with this piece by Hanif Abdurraqib: [Poems From An Email Exchange. Re: Your Submission 9:27 pm.](https://nifmuhammad.medium.com/poems-from-an-email-exchange-ed1490fa73a1#.hoxirtssu) i once attended a reading/Q&A by this poet, in 2016ish, in a very small lecture hall, at the same time that i was literally being dumped via text message, and ever since then i've associated his work with that horrible, humiliating moment - i was flustered and upset and asked a stupid question, and then i had to leave early because i was about to start crying - but i've come back around to him lately, and especially over the last year or two. aren't all questions stupid, when you think about it? get over it! who cares! read more poetry! send more emails! love letters or otherwise. happy new year.


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